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
