Sorry your browser is not supported!

You are using an outdated browser that does not support modern web technologies, in order to use this site please update to a new browser.

Browsers supported include Chrome, FireFox, Safari, Opera, Internet Explorer 10+ or Microsoft Edge.

Geek Culture / 2 Days of Programming: Initial Impressions

Author
Message
Outcast
21
Years of Service
User Offline
Joined: 3rd Feb 2003
Location:
Posted: 6th Feb 2003 05:08
I've been playing with Dark Basic for about 2 days now. I've been following the tutorials and thought I'd give a shout out of my impressions. It will be in list form because that's the way I like it!

1) In two days of off and on programming, I've put together a textured arena, with textured terrain, and now have a cube that I follow around in 3rd person. It's amazing how straight forward this was. In a page of code, I've done what would have taken hundreds and hundreds lines normally (using C++ and your choice of OGL/DX)

2) I like the documentation. If I want to know how a function works, I just look in the index and type it in. Simple. This has come in really handy.

3) The tutorial code is a mixed bag. While following the terrain tutorial, I could never get my textures to line up with the terrain properly. The lesson pretty much said "cut and paste this code into your own code, then call the such-and-such function" with no explanation of what the variables did or how to adjust them. I tried to load the Candyland terrain that is part of MatEdit, and neither my program, nor the one generated by MatEdit would load the terrain with the textures as it looked in the program. As it stands, I still have no idea what I'm doing wrong, and no one has responded to my post in the newcomers section (hint hint)

4) I wanted to attach the hovercraft to the player object today. I got the hovercraft loaded, but after trying repeated could not get it textured nor could I attach it to my cube player object. I tried to load up the dba associated with that lesson, and it crashed and burned the same as my own program.

Overall, I'm impressed, but a little put-off by the quality of the tutorial. So far, I've set up an arena, created a 3rd person camera, created terrain, and loaded a hovercraft. Only half of these have worked for me without a hitch. This is more troubling considering I have BlitzBasic open up and it's Driver demo has a car on terrain with gravity, friction and wheel animations in about a page of code. I'm going to spend about a month on DB, then switch to BB and see which one I like better, then I'll make my decision.

Outcast
Outcast
21
Years of Service
User Offline
Joined: 3rd Feb 2003
Location:
Posted: 6th Feb 2003 06:01
Just like to add that I just noticed the tutorials were just put up this year. That explains why they are still a little rough. I also found a posting that my images might need to be loaded into my project and that's why I couldn't get my hovercraft textured. Hopefully that will work.

Outcast

Shadow Robert
21
Years of Service
User Offline
Joined: 22nd Sep 2002
Location: Hertfordshire, England
Posted: 6th Feb 2003 06:13
the new tutorials are just that... new tutorials
however the game they're based upon are old.

i'd suggest working from the old tutorial
this isn't to knock the new one, but the old one done by DBS themselves are quite alot better.

Tsu'va Oni Ni Jyuuko Fiori Sei Tau!
One block follows the suit ... the whole suit of blocks is the path ... what have you found?
Disco Stu
21
Years of Service
User Offline
Joined: 22nd Nov 2002
Location: Australia
Posted: 6th Feb 2003 07:05
The older tutorials had more beef, but I liked the simplicity of the new ones. BM did a good job with limit rush, its fast and responsive.
Sina.

"Maybe if you ain't so good, I ain't so bad."--Tony Manero to Stephanie (Karen Lynn Gorney)
Richard Davey
Retired Moderator
21
Years of Service
User Offline
Joined: 30th Apr 2002
Location: On the Jupiter Probe
Posted: 6th Feb 2003 12:45
Well BOTH tutorials are still up there so if you don't like one, read the other! and if you don't like that - write your own

Cheers,

Rich

"Gentlemen, we are about to short-circuit the Universe!"
DB Team / Atari ST / DarkForge / Retro Gaming
Kangaroo2
21
Years of Service
User Offline
Joined: 26th Sep 2002
Location: United Kingdom
Posted: 6th Feb 2003 14:58
To be honest I don't like the tutorials included with DB1 or DBP they are mostly useless for new users. However as some1 who was strongly experienced with programming games anyway, I didn't neeeeed good tutorials, I just played about with the Pro language for about an hour and it was evident there was more potential there than BB. Anyway I don't want to turn this into a DBP/BB arguement thats been done and its boring. Personally, I love Pro and am enjoying watching it develop, and learning new aspects to sharpen up my code

Coming Soon! Kangaroo2 Studio... wait and quiver with anticipation! lol
samjones@kangaroo2.com - http://www.kangaroo2.com - If the apocalypse comes, email me
rapscaLLion
21
Years of Service
User Offline
Joined: 29th Aug 2002
Location: Canada
Posted: 6th Feb 2003 15:01
doesn't Mat-Edit not work with DBP?

Anyway, I'm glad you like it, Welcome to the world of DB

Alex Wanuch
aka rapscaLLion
Kousen Dev Progress >> Currently Working On Editors
Outcast
21
Years of Service
User Offline
Joined: 3rd Feb 2003
Location:
Posted: 6th Feb 2003 20:47
Kangaroo2, can you go into some of the reason why you thought DB was better. I'm not trying to start a flame war, and granted I've only been playing with DB and BB for a few days, but they look very very similar, it's hard to figure out which I want. I'm hoping as I progress it will become obvious, but is there anything you can point out immediately that would help me out?

Outcast

P.S. I scanned the General Talks forums and couldn't find any comparisons of the two. It sucks that this forum doesn't have a search function

Kangaroo2
21
Years of Service
User Offline
Joined: 26th Sep 2002
Location: United Kingdom
Posted: 6th Feb 2003 22:31
Sorry man like I said u r very welcome here but I really don't want to risk such a discussion again - look throughout these forums and you'll find plenty of documentation on the advantages of both. I'll just say that if you were comparing DB1 with BB it would be a lot closer, both have advantages and I used to use both side by side. However Pro is far advanced in Flexibility, speed and graphical niceness Nobody argue! PLEASE! I have a whole bag of 'shh' with your names on it!

Coming Soon! Kangaroo2 Studio... wait and quiver with anticipation! lol
samjones@kangaroo2.com - http://www.kangaroo2.com - If the apocalypse comes, email me
Kangaroo2
21
Years of Service
User Offline
Joined: 26th Sep 2002
Location: United Kingdom
Posted: 6th Feb 2003 22:33
PS I think most of the disscussions were in the DBPro board, mostly around whether or not to buy DBPro. However, ignore the initial complaints of too many bugs, most major ones are fixed now I don't feel guilty about making you read the archives, you'll learn a lot in the process

Coming Soon! Kangaroo2 Studio... wait and quiver with anticipation! lol
samjones@kangaroo2.com - http://www.kangaroo2.com - If the apocalypse comes, email me
QuothTheRaven
21
Years of Service
User Offline
Joined: 2nd Oct 2002
Location: United States
Posted: 7th Feb 2003 04:12
I disagree on Kangaroo2 on the tutorials issue. I loved them. With no outside help I was able to code a very stable first person online shooter engine from ONLY the tutorials.

Albiet I've been programming basic on calculators for years, which gave me years of code theory experience, I found the tutorials very very useful. I started with the beginners tutorials and worked my way up, and though it was a rough trip I learned a whole lot from them. It just took a lot of concentration, and I was entirely self sufficient.
Shadow Robert
21
Years of Service
User Offline
Joined: 22nd Sep 2002
Location: Hertfordshire, England
Posted: 7th Feb 2003 05:24
i kinda liked the tutorial that came with DarkBasic... cause it was a compound where it added like one or two lines and explained how they were being used
think if someone had made one like that for when memblocks were released more people would understand them more.

But that'd be considering they actually read the tutorial - most just look up the function and it doesn't do exactly what they like, kinda complain about it.
I mean don't get me wrong not saying that BM's are bad tutorials, just not my cuppa tea so to speak.

perhaps i'm too experienced though to pass a fair judgement on using them? i mean after all they're not aimed at people who already understand all of what is being taught hehee

Tsu'va Oni Ni Jyuuko Fiori Sei Tau!
One block follows the suit ... the whole suit of blocks is the path ... what have you found?
Soyuz
21
Years of Service
User Offline
Joined: 17th Dec 2002
Location:
Posted: 7th Feb 2003 05:32
My main gripe is that some of the help for commands is utterly shizer! If you don't have prior experience with memblocks and lists & stacks then don't expect to figure it out from the help files! And it drives me nuts when you click on "usage example" and it doesn't even contain the command you're trying to learn!!

But other than this I totally love DB Pro - I never tried BB but it seemed so easy to pick up and run with DB that nothing else gets a look in!
Outcast
21
Years of Service
User Offline
Joined: 3rd Feb 2003
Location:
Posted: 7th Feb 2003 05:38
Good points. I spent most of the day with BB. I'm basically replicating the DB tutorial in BB just to get a feel for what can be done in both languages.

It's an interesting experience. In BB, I had to write my own newxvalue, newyvalue functions, which wasn't hard, but still it was nice that DB provided this. I'm also getting the feeling that DB has a larger selection of these type of functions.

I still can't get my hovercraft texture mapped, and after looking at the old tutorials, the new tutorials, and the load image documentation, I still can't figure out why I get a read error every time I try to load the texture. Same with glueing an object.

I do like the way that BB provides you with id's, instead of you specifying them in DB. Not a big deal. I'll just write a little function to return a unique number every time. It just allows for more messiness in DB.

It's beginning to look like what I've thought. I think the two programs are comparable, but DB has an edge simply because it has been developing it's 3d side longer than BB.

I'm going to take a look through the other groups and see if I can't see discussion on the differences between the two. I completely understand everyone's reluctance not to be drug down into a quagmire. I was thinking that they may have been deleted because they were so controversial.

Thanks,

Outcast

Kangaroo2
21
Years of Service
User Offline
Joined: 26th Sep 2002
Location: United Kingdom
Posted: 7th Feb 2003 23:07
Unlike certain other rival forums, DBP forums don't really censor user's posts and creativity. I'm sure only REAL offensive content is censored - how to make an Atom bomb etc We prefer the more dignified and grown up approach of censoring ourselves. (Nobody mention my drunken "edited" porno postage lol)

Coming Soon! Kangaroo2 Studio... wait and quiver with anticipation! lol
samjones@kangaroo2.com - http://www.kangaroo2.com - If the apocalypse comes, email me
CaptinScarlet
21
Years of Service
User Offline
Joined: 12th Feb 2003
Location: United Kingdom
Posted: 13th Feb 2003 02:25
Any chance of getting the Limit Rush tutorial in a more readable or printable format? maybe pdf format?.

Login to post a reply

Server time is: 2024-03-29 15:08:19
Your offset time is: 2024-03-29 15:08:19