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After developing games in DBPro for a few years I moved to C/C++ ( actually I'm learning C/C++ at the University I'm attending), after I had the knowledge I learned WinApi and produced some software app.
After one year of break from DBPro I would like to get back into games development and one of the choices (despite of learning OGRE or XNA or many, many other engines ) is Dark GDK and I have some questions about it, like:

- are the programms produced in Dark GDK running as fast as produced in the DBPro or faster/slower?

- is it possible to mix WinApi and Dark GDK to have the Dark GDK engine runinng the game while have WinApi menu bar or windows usage?

- can I mix freely classes, functions etc. with Dark GDK commands?

I would appreciate any reply concerning these answers.

1) The commands themselves will be the same, but the code that calls those commands will be much faster in DarkGDK.

2) Yes, it behaves just like any application using DirectX for graphics.

3) Yes, it is just a library for C++, not a whole language in itself.

To answer your questions, yes to all 3



Programs in GDK will be at least as fast if not faster than their DBPro equivs. C++ is a lower level language.



Yes, it is completely possible to use WinAPI calls from within a DarkGDK program.
Essentially you just setup your own message catcher, you can get the handle to the DarkGDK window from "globstruct.h", and a bunch of other variables aswell.
I have a tutorial on exactly that subject that I found somewhere on these forums a long time ago, i'll attach it now, there are 2 PDF's that make it up, the first, is a general WinAPI tutorial, the second is based around getting some basic WinAPI functionality into a GDK app, Menu bars, dialogs, buttons, bitmaps etc... even GDI drawing .. Just to note, I DID NOT write these tutorials, I only found them on here, im sure if you do a search you could find the original thread somewhere.
Also they assume that you are using either the Professional or Team editions of Visual Studio as they refer to its inbuilt Resouce editor to create the menus etc, if you are using the Express Editions they don't come with the resource editor although they are still fully capable of viewing and using resources, a google search should point you to some external apps that can create the resource files for you if you arent sure of the code.

The GDK & WinAPI Tutorial was written and designed by Dave Burford (Sephnroth)

The Win32API Tutorial was written by a bloke called TheForger, full credits are contained within boths documents.



You sure can, if you wanted to you could write your own wrapper for the functions themselves(or look into some that have already been done, Jegas Game Classes by Jason P Sage and i think AndrewT wrote some up aswell, searching these forums, again, should get you what you want to know)

Hope this helps a little.

You bet! That helped me a lot! Thanks to both of you guys, now everything is clear to me

Mista Wilson thanks for the tutorials I really appreciate your effort