I was going through a bunch of my old files and found tons and tons of DarkBASIC Classic snippets, programs, and tests. So much of it I have no idea what I was trying to do and so much of it was some really cool ideas! I was looking at one of my recent projects - to get Tokamak Physics engine working with DBC. It works at it's most basic level so maybe I'll actually start coding on it again - if I can remember the nuances of DBC.
I do remember that it was a lot of fun to program in this basic language when I was into it. I happened upon collision and animation DLLs I had written specifically for DBC. I found a series of 2d fast drawing routines in a DLL that I would have to sit down and figure out my intentions for. Then there's all these small functions to do all kinds of programming, string, or math tasks that DBC didn't do natively. I even found set's of functions that would use huge bitmap files to generate terrains and layer ghosted versions of the terrains to get "fake" bump mapping for the ground. The textures would even scroll as you moved across it. I could see my progression in terms of design where I tried to use DBC matrices first but their limitations and bad texture layout eventually led me to use meshes and change them in memblocks on the fly.
Anyway, it was fun to poke around with some of the programs and I found a bunch of entries for the DBC challenges too.
One thing I noticed, the programs that run on my old windows 98 machine don't work quite the same on the newer windows 7 and above machines. The graphics function differently - the normal are weird, transparency doesn't work unless combined with ghosting, the animation commands in DBC 120 don't wrap correctly...
Anyway it was all a lot of fun when it was fun. I keep telling myself I'll play around with it again...
Enjoy your day.
