Sorry your browser is not supported!

I've been lurking around the DB Community for years hoping it would develop an SDK. Then the C++ SDK was born, and I thought this was a great step forward. But I waited on the .NET version that was rumored to be in the works. I am not fond of wrappers but if done right they can be every bit as effective as native .NET. So I was happy to see it come to DB.

Here is where I start to be less than pleasant...sorry in advance.

I find the example files and projects interesting and the help file full of definitions but, this is my first experience with Dark Basic so I am very unfamiliar with many of the commands/etc.

I deliberately waited to buy DB until a .NET SDK was released but now find that it is not particularly useful with no prior DB experience under my belt. I also gather from some posts in the forums that prior DB experience is not necessarily helpful as they are all fairly diffent in application from DBPro to GDK.NEt anyway. A few of the items in the help file are straight forward if you have even a little 3D experience but with every SDK using their own parameters, properties and methods on even the basic objects and their manipulation, it gets confusing quick.

Really, almost anyone can make a cube spin in C# or VB.Net, or load a mesh and play music. So these examples don't really do much.

Now, I have seen some really nice stuff in DBPro, from other programmers I know and work with on occasion. From what they tell me DB isn't nearly as buggy and unstable as is rumored, if you are careful. So I was excited to see the .NET SDK and bought it as soon as I saw it was available.

So, if this is really running on the DB Engine, I should be able to do some nice stuff, make some real 3D Apps or Games. But vitually nothing in the package or on the forums gets me there, or anywhere near.

I hope I am not being too quick to judge here, but there doesn't seem to be a definite commitment to develop the help files or tuts or examples. I read in post after post that "the .NET GDK has to wait for updates until the main GDK is updated." and that some interesting things are being developed for the .NET version of the SDK. That all sounds great. But, good doc is key to ANY development effort, ESPECIALLY and API or SDK. Right now the examples are not even commented very well beyond the "this program does blah blah blah." type of comments.

I _hope_ that there is a real commitment to documentation, tutorials and examples, and that they are CURRENTLY being worked on before a bunch of wiz bang plug-ins and add-ons are developed, and that I am "jumping the gun," but right now I'm thinking I'm glad I decided to get my feet wet with the "freeware" version before I found out there was almost none of this available and so far I really haven't seen or read anything to the contrary in announcements or the forums.

Please prove a tired grumpy old man wrong.

shayde, It's difficult to answer your points without sounding too forward, and I do appreciate that you're not the only person who has brought these points up about the documentation and lack of tutorials, and I agree that this is something that needs to be addressed, but I must make my point that it is just me who works on the DGDK.NET toolkit documentation and the samples provided with it. Aside from the fact that I'm also working on projects to work with DGDK.NET, including providing better sample source code that can demonstrate better OOP features of the toolkit, the necessity to get required plugins to make the product more viable and attractive, providing as much feedback and support as I can, I'm doing all I can.

DGDK.NET is a huge project, not what you see in the box, but what is actually required to create the toolkit to begin with, and I had to write extra unseen tools to produce the end result, and this has to tie into the documentation as well so that added functions from the original DGDK toolkit is reflected within the documentation. It's just alot of work that has to be check, and double checked before I can even issue a release to TGC for distribution. This also involves complete testing of the (existing) samples in the product on two PCs to ensure that the toolkit installs and runs etc.

I know you don't really want to hear all this as it's not really your problem, and I understand that, but I will do my best to provide better documentation, added samples, and all support needed to ensure that DGDK.NET is and will be a top development tool.

Paul.

One thing you might do in the meantime, while Apex does all he can to keep his head above water, is maybe look at some DBP tuts and documentation. I know that sounds weird but the command set is going to be very similar, and it will help you familiarize yourself with what the commands do. The code in .NET will be vastly different from dbp code, but the commands/args etc will be nearly spot on. At least until new tuts and samples and help files are released.

Also you have to remember that the dgdk.net was just released about a month or so ago. As people use it and develop games and test code you will see more of it make its way to this forum, which will also help. Until then if you post about something in particular (problem with a command or what command should I use type of questions) I am sure people can help from here. Thats what the forum is for, to suppliment the documentation, regardless of its current state.

Hope that helps somewhat

This might just be me, but if you can get a mesh loaded and spinning, then chances are you can get a mesh moving with keyboard input. You must also have a camera in there somewhere to see the cube spinning, so you must be able to do some camera junk as well, like third person. If you know that much, you could implement some simple box collision checks with meshes, make a map, a player object, some enemies, have the enemies kill you when you hit them by using a variable or two, and have the enemies be deleted when you jump on their heads, and boom... you have a game going.

If you can do a cube spinning, you can do a lot. Just saying.

I appreciate the quick response from both of you and especially the point that you _are_ working on providing better doc and examples.

For the most part, it's the assurance that it was actually being done that I was looking for.

As far as you answering my post in too "forward" a fashion, I am sure you guys can get hold of my email address; I would not be offended if you wished to answer me privately in a more candid fashion.

As an IT guy of numberless decades, much of it in various programming or project management capacities, I can appreciate the monumental task you have undertaken. A quick look at the help file confirms the amount of effort put into wrapping the GDK. The sheer number of members of all those objects, their properties, methods and parameters that you have made available to .NET is impressive. I'll bet you know the GDK better than you ever thought you would by now. But I wanted to make sure (maybe I was being a little too "forward") that my perspective as a developer was clearly understood. I am sure I am not the only one on these forums that has had to deal with maintaining code in a business environment, both well and not so well commented and documented. And to be honest, sometimes that code was mine, and I had to revisit something done months or years earlier and had to practically start all over because I couldn't make heads nor tails of it or why I did it "that" way. It's not acceptable in my work or in a saleable product. But my point there is clear I believe so, I'll leave it at that.

I can also appreciate your efforts as far as the lone guy working on something like this.

From the marketing position, which was brought up in one of your posts, there is also the fact that if we customers, find the product too difficult to use or with too little documentation/examples, that will bear out in the market as our experiences become known. Many of us have spent money on maybe several other engines trying to find the right combination of power, ease and examples. I'm sure many of us here have bought Blitz3D, C-4 or others and even tried our hand at MOGRE and Irrlicht and have been checking out Visual3D.Net and some of the others as well. Each, for one reason or the other has been a joy and/or a pain to work with and I'll dare say that most of the time it has not been the capabilities of the product in question, it has been the lack of good clear examples that really explained what was going on.

Now, lest I end this on a sour note, I appreciate and recognize the hard work that has gone into this and the fact that you are involved in what is basically a one-man show. I also appreciate the implied commitment to getting us better tutorials and examples. I'll bet if we got those, a lot of our (and your) frustrations with what we can and cannot do with the .NET version would evaporate. There are a lot of bright and talented people here that would likely have much to contribute if given the chance.

Still, I apologize if my comments struck a nerve; that was not my intention. I appreciate the effort that is being put into this product and look forward to its continued development and the increasing value as the product and its documentation continue to expand.

And, as a side note, might I suggest that the GDK forums be split so there are 2 distinct forums for the GDK and the GDK.Net. Some of the elements of using .Net will be completely confusing from the C++ perspective as well as some of the C++ conventions will be confusing and unusable to those going OOP and Managed code.

The old man thanks you for letting him spout off with out being rude back to him.

Thanks

My personal experience with DB/Pro/SDK is, all commands work pretty the same way and in C++ a little different. I ignored the help tutorials completely and started by using existing code, collecting from this and other forums, dissecting each piece one by one, until I got the grip of the DB language philosophy.

Later, I got the books which help to understand beyond the basics, and contain some valuable help, although they aren't exactly a how-to manual.

Nevertheless I believe, really good tutorials would give DB a great boost, but will need also somebody dedicated on that job for quite some time. Or, as it could happen in Wiki, single top developers explain specific issues at their choice. The place is there, all it needs is an account to login ...

Rich said this is already being done, just not sure when it will pop up. Id image before this month is out.

DGDK documentation would be nice to cover all those tasty-looking new commands, but it isn't essential if you already have DBP (even the trial version would do... I think), as the key-words are effectivly the same.

I've been using the DBP help files for assistance with DGDK, and you can get that at http://darkbasicpro.thegamecreators.com/?f=trial

I'll do my best to try and fill this gap before the next updates, but... and I will stress, that the documentation itself will require some intervention regarding the explanation of certain functions which have not yet been documented, purely because they were not documented in the original DGDK help files. And in honesty, I'm uncertain as to the exact behaviour of these functions also.



Not going to happen, I'm not the kind of person to belittle an individual purely because they have a reason or an opinion that needs expressing.... and besides, if you had <censored> on my barbacue, I'll only go out and buy more firelighters... Seriously, that's what the forums are for, so that ideas and suggestions can be shared in order to improve product attraction.



Thanks for the complemant. The original documentation is held in HTML files, but what made it difficult was creating the XML parse file necessary to extract the original function explanations from the DGDK html files, and embed them into a format that is relavent to the DGDK.NET function syntax. This required an application that could interpret the XML file, search the function names, and embed the function descriptions in their before rebuilding a new chm file. Long winded, but it works so far.



It is my friend, I've had my fare share of scenarios in the past to arrive at the same conclusion on other projects, and lets face it, clients who do not appreciate the work involved in a project, will always ask for more than what is truly viable within the time constraints of the project.



I'm kinda banking on it, becuase it's going to be the forum and customers that will help me to bring the product further along where it becomes easier and more unstandable to new developers. Without the forum, and feedback from people such as yourself, I'd lost confidence long ago.



As said, I will try to fill this gaping hole, but it will take time, and I can only hope that yourself, and other customers (pre and post purchase) will be patient in that this will improve. I have produced a video lesson which can be downloaded from here, although this is very much aimed towards the absolute beginner, so if the tutorial sounds directed to the lesser educated etc, I appologise:

http://www.apexnow.co.uk/tutorial1.swf



Absolutely, infact I'm banking on it, that these individuals will surpass the initial product expectations and make something truly unique!



This is actually planned to happen sometime early this year. It was brought into light from Rich that this will happen, (and more), but until things settle down after the rush, and the product has been updated, additional addons etc are on the way, this will happen eventually.

Anyway, I hope this answers some of the more pressing issues that were brought up.

Paul.

I personally don't think this is a good idea. There's a lot of stuff in common between the two sku's (not least of all the code!) and people will stand to gain a lot from seeing/learning with what is happening in the other camp.

Maybe we can help APEX to do some work? When we are sitting and trying things we can sent it to him as a demo or maybe some want to write a tutorial.

Or maybe we can help with the helpfiles

Just an idea because I can be hard work to be only one to make a so huge project.

You know, a wiki wouldnt be all that bad

Imagine the documentation for every command, written by custumers for customers. This would ofcorse include example code and so on.

Im a world of warcraft player and i also slightly delved into the UI addon creation. Some people started a wiki for all WoW related info and that includes a (mostly) full documentation of the API to write addons. Its a great resource and something like that for the entire TGC programming tools product line would be very nice.

http://www.wowwiki.com/Interface_Customization

James Bondo - On what server? Im playing on Ravencrest

Thats a discussion for another time... take a look at the adress in my sig

I have to agree, as a lot of us complained about lack of documentation and samples for some time, but Paul's only one person, and I know that he is doing the best he can to support us.

I can tell this because of my personal experience doing the DarkEngine. I'm pretty sure that it was not even 10% of the work he did, and still, it was a lot of work (and it's not complete by now).

I am developing plugins now to try to support the DGDK.NET, as it is a great SDK. DarkEngine and DarkEmReL are out there, and I'm already working on a GUI plugin. Unfortunately, as I am also only one person, I can't be writing plugins and a lot of samples at the same time, but as soon as DarkUI (that's the code-name) is released, I will be coding some more samples (although they will probably be using DarkEngine, as I have to support my own wrapper).

Also, I will be re-stating: if anyone really needs, I may code a different version or DarkEmReL and probably DarkGUI to be used without DarkEngine, that's NO PROBLEM.

Cheers!
(Yeah, coffee... No beer for me)

kBessa

Oh.... a DarkUI... cant wait

Right now Im finding codesnippets and rewriting them to DarkEngine (have just wrote the Camera mover) )