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I know I may be somewhat of a broken record for you guys, but I just put together a summary of features provided by PureGDK with some comparisons to DarkGDK and would like to share it with you.

If you don't know what PureGDK is yet, if you've been unsure what it is or what it can do compared to TGC's port of DBP to C++, or if you've been unable to piece together all of the little details, here it is in one place:

http://forum.thegamecreators.com/?m=forum_view&t=187939&b=38

There are also several beta tester testimonials at the bottom. You can find a direct link to them here:

http://forum.thegamecreators.com/?m=forum_view&t=187940&b=38

If any of you are using PureGDK now and have anything to say on the subject, I'm sure DarkGDK users would appreciate hearing a voice other than mine!

I also wanted to give a big thanks to those of you who have been testing PureGDK do far. The comments and reports you've made have really helped improve this product.

Dark Basic Pro has a lot of support for plugins, a lot for free, and there's absolutely loads of them. I left DBP to move onto GDK because I had issues with DBP lack of variable assignments and C++ I can do almost blindfolded. Unfortunately GDK was missing something I really was after for sometime and asking for help in the forums for some time to build an object up from scratch. DBP had that solution with IanM's Matrix1 Utils.

I kept up with all the updates on PureGDK, following its progress. Mistrel had been putting together support for the DBP plugins.

Matrix1 Utils had a command "Make Object New". Not available in GDK and no-one was able to help.

And because I had come to a halt with my project, nothing to do but twiddle my thumbs, I decided it was about time to make the jump.

Thinking it would be a big jump I started early. The video was quiet and long but the help file documentation helped me a lot easier to install and setup. I transferred my current project over, making a few changes to some of the function calls. Nice to find I didn't need to find a free object when creating objects. A little bit of fiddling using the help docs and it worked. Also with a nice speed increase too, even in debug mode, and it does compile in release mode too.

So, I posted a message asking about the Matrix1 Utils. Mistrel had these done and ready within an hour.

Finally I could move on with my project, any longer and I'd probably would have give up.

Needless to say, I'm impressed and glad for the decision to make the jump to PureGDK. My project has moved on with the help of the addition of the Matrix1 Utils and I can now make my game.

So for me: Speed increase over GDK, DBP plugin support and all the rest of the stuff you can do from a WinMain() or main()...

Happy me...

Is the speed increase due to the optimization of the DBP code? I noticed in the post you linked to it said you can use VS2008 C++. Is that correct? What kind of differences would I have to my current project if I took the plunge to PGDK?

Some of the actual GDK function names have changed, ie dbMakeObjectCube(ID, size) would be dbCreateObjectCube(ID, size) or ID = dbCreateObjectCube(size) which will return a free ID...

That's actually cool. At first, I was very tight with the sequence of IDs, but I have realized that the order doesn't actually matter (I think). I REALLY want to use PGDK, but I don't want to spend hours--if not days-- hunting down command differences. But, for my original question, is there an actual difference in performance or is it just perception/opinion?

My same piece of code was directly ported over from DarkGDK to PureGDK and it ran so much faster on frame rates. As to why I haven't a clue but I was very pleasantly surprised with it. Even though to call a DBP function (or GDK) it seems a function call, calls another function, and so on but still I got miles better frame rates. Maybe it's because you're not stuck within the default loop the GDK wizard gives you.

It was a tad fiddly to setup a project but once it was there after about 5 to 10 minutes it was up and running. The chm help file was easier to follow than the video. I'll be back onto PureGDK in a few days.

The change of functions names are quite easy to do, unless you've got 50k+ lines of source code.

EDIT: I started on beta 9 and was worried bout changing to another beta. I just changed everything over to beta 12 and didn't have to make a change to a single line of source code...

Optional parameters are always at the end and *never* change their order.

The correct parameter order is:

int dbCreateObjectCube(float size.f [, int objectID])



There is a significant difference in the underlying code between PureGDK and DarkGDK, so it's hard to tell where it's coming from.

I also did a quick comparison of DBP and PureGDK using the camera demo. PureGDK, despite using the same function calls, was noticeably faster there too.



There will be some growing pains but I hope that you will find the new documentation extremely helpful in this area. There is even full-text searching.

See dbSetErrorCallback() in the documentation. It will help alert you of any error thrown by an invalid parameter. The biggest headache I have when converting code is just reordered parameters. The advantage is that it allows support for non-polymorphic languages as well as making the code cleaner and easier to understand like this:

In DarkGDK you can use these commands to change the resolution:



In PureGDK the same command with optional parameters is:



In this function each parameter after width and height can be optionally specified.