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Hi Lee and the TGC programmers...

Is it possible for you all to work on redesigning and rebuilding
DarkBasic Professional to perform as well as Nuclear Basic or even
BlitzMax ? In general DarkBasic games run poorly compared to games
made with these other BASIC compiler products, mainly due to the
machine code that it generates, according to the makers of Nuclear
Basic. Please read the comments they wrote about Nuclear Basic
in the "Nuclear Basic Help Manual".

In the "NuclearBasicPerformanceDoc.PDF" file attached to this message, the creator of Nuclear Basic (NB) compares the output
compiled code of NB, BlitzMax (BM) and DarkBasic Pro (DBP).

And in all the output comparisons, Dark Basic Pro produced machine
code that executes usually 5 to 10 times slower than NB or BM.

Also, Nuclear Basic can produce threaded code that uses all the
detected cores on a PC, and it seems to run as fast as most games
made with C/C++ compilers game engines, even at very high polygon
counts. For example, run some of the sample code that comes with
Nuclear Basic, and you will see that it can render 3-4 million
triangles (polygons) very smoothly, at over 230+ FPS !! without
turning the game into a choppy slide-show presentation.

According to Matthew DeWalt, creator of the Nuclear Basic and
Nuclear Fusion tools, it seems DarkBasic Pro produces the slowest
machine code for performing graphics operations and calculations,
usually 5 to 11 times slower than other competing 3D BASIC game
development tools.

This is probably why the FPSC Reloaded software runs so slow and
with a very poor framerate. I ran FPSC Reloaded on my new PC which
is a 3.7 GHz i7 CPU, with a 4GB GeForce GTX780 card, and still the
FPSC Reloaded demo games had poor framerates and very bad firing
response when aiming the weapons. I feel like I had just wasted
$100 USD on the FPSC Reloaded Gold Pledge, because the games made
are only very very basic (low polygon count) and they don't work
very smoothly. Sorry, but FPSC Reloaded games perform very poorly.

Why was performance so poor? Because it was based on the DarkBasic
Pro interpreter engine. If you and the TGC team just change the
DarkBasic Pro compiler, to create non-interpreted machine code that
runs just as fast as games made with Nuclear Basic, you would have
a REALLY PROFESSIONAL game development tool that can create AAA
quality commercial games.

Try to re-design or re-build DarkBasic Pro to be compatible with
DirectX / Direct3D 11, or the newest version of OpenGL, and make it
cross-platform, so it can run on most types of popular operating
systems. Your DarkBasic Pro games create very slow code that just
cannot compete with games made with Nuclear Basic or BlitzMax,
mainly because the output machine code is highly inefficient and
slow. However, your community of game developers has developed a
lot of good media (art work, plug-ins, add-ons, etc.), it would be
a big pity to see all this hard work go to waste when they all
leave and migrate to a faster and better performing product. Even
the non-3D software made with PureBasic runs much faster than
software created with DB Pro. You should also try to include new
modern features into DB Pro, such as Windows Forms and controls,
just like Pure Basic, to allow coders to create Windows-type apps
and database interfaces, and also let developers create internet
applications for web browsers.

Good luck Lee and the TGC!

I would say that anyone moving away from DBPro, should be moving to C# or C++, not another incarnation of BASIC.

The whole reason why DBPro is so popular is that it's so easy to use and quick to learn - something that other BASIC's simply can't claim. On modern PC's it's fast enough to do what we need, DBPro is a hobbyist language at heart.

To say it should do this that or anything differently at this stage in it's life is ridiculous, sorry but we've had these sorts of posts before, and they add nothing to the forum. I mean, what are you really telling us here that we don't already know?, what difference does it really make to us, if our choice of language is slower than Nuclear Basic... meanwhile it handles anything I need it to do... so why is it even a problem?

It isn't. Why even use BASIC if it's practically as fast and as damn complex as C++ - why not just use C++!
DBPro is not there to compete with assembly language, it's there to make games with.

You've got to somewhat careful spreading bench marking information without explicit context. There's a number of reasons for this, but often they're intentionally or naively biased. What can occur, is the bench mark make comparisons that aren't actually equal.

Case in point: If we timed two loops, one compiled in most of dialects of BASIC and other compiled in any major C compiler. The code might look like this.







Any C compiler worth a grain of salt, would win hands down, it's be of 100's if not 1000's of times faster on paper. But the comparison is invalid, since those compilers will optimize away the loop at compile time. Leaving us nothing more than a potential assignment to execute at runtime.

So we're really comparing this,











It's not my place to defend DBpro, but this isn't accurate. The compiled applications are not interpreted in any form. Anyone can verify this themselves, by looking at the code it produces. You'll find the raw assembly in your temp folder.

Yes the machine code it produces is less efficient than it could be. However, like all languages, the programmers who understand the compilers idiosyncrasies best will achieve the best results.

I use dark basic pro, Daily. I am hoping the engine fix's lee, Has made to it. Will fix it up a bit, And hope to see the updates. At this current time, I am also learning DarkGDK/visual studio.

Just incase you know