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Just by using Dark GDK and only Dark GDK, is it possilbe to make a game as vast as FFXI or World of Warcraft (even if it takes you till the end of your life )? Could you theoretically make the ground, sky, characters, etc... just by manipulating crap tons of objects like boxes and whatnot?

Question:
I want to make a game like Flashpoint / Unreal 2003 / Half-Life / Counterstrike / Runescape (etc etc etc). Can DarkBASIC / DarkBASIC Professional handle this?

Answer:
We get many questions like this - "Can DarkBASIC make a game like ____" and the answer goes something like this:

The question really is - can YOU make a game like ____ ? The thing about Runescape, Quake, Command and Conquer, etc is that from a technical level yes DarkBASIC/Professional could cope with them - but only if the programmer creating the game has the ability to do so.

DarkBASIC isn't going to create "stats menus" for you automatically, nor will it let you define skills that grow over a period of time - because it's a programming language, it expects you to set-up all of these things via your code.

For a game the size and complexity of the one you mentioned you'll be dealing with a massive amount of variables. By way of an example let's look at a far more simpler game - one you are hopefully familiar with - Space Invaders. In this game you have a sequence of aliens that move back and forth across the screen, slowly descending. You control a space ship that can fire back at them and hide under shields that get slowly eaten away.

Pretty basic, yes? Now think about the code that needs to be in place for this to all work. First of all you have to write code that will check to see if the user is trying to move the ship left or right, then check to see if they are firing. If they are firing has a bullet already been launched? because in space invaders you can only fire one bullet at a time. If a bullet has been fired it needs moving up the screen and each time it moves you need to check to see if it's hit something. If it hits an alien - that alien needs removing, the score needs increasing and you need to check for other events such as "was that the last alien?" "do we restart the level?" "should the game speed up now?". Meanwhile during all of this you need to control the aliens, moving them back and forth and down the screen, firing as they go.

What was fundamentally a very simple game at the start now appears to be considerably more complex when you break it down into it's separate functions - and we've not even covered them all. Now appreciate just how much is going on in Runescape in comparison.

We don't want to sound like I'm putting you off programming, because that's the last thing we want to do! It can be a very rewarding and educational experience (not to mention it can lead to some great jobs in the industry if you're good enough!). But we don't want to disillusion you - there will be no "create stats panel" command in DarkBASIC, there will be no "monster hits player" - these are all things that need programming and programming by you. It's the same for any language though - there isn't a single language out there that differs from this approach.

So technically - yes, DarkBASIC has the power to make this game. But prepare to invest some serious time and work to make it happen.

Why would you want to do that, just download a free modelling program, theres plenty out there that are free and will do the job soo much better than this. Even if you did manage to make all of these things just with GDK commands you will get nowhere near the quality you will get even if you arent a great modeller not too mention the animation needed to make a high quality game like this will be impossible to doo