DBP (Dark Basic Professional)

Dark Basic Professional (DBP) is a rapid development language written by The Games Creators.

Why?

Its based around the "BASIC" syntax and so its very human-friendly to read (for example, to make a cube you would type MAKE OBJECT CUBE). Unfortunately, this can make large games quite difficult to managed and to counter this problem, TGC also released a C++ based version of Dark Basic Pro called Dark Game SDK

How?

Dark Basic Pro has a fantastic community which I not only personally rely on, but have also contributed to. One of my personal favourites of the forum is the challenges thread in the Dark Basic Professional Forum. There have been some fantastic examples of coding "prowess" and I, with help from the community, have produced a catalogue site, www.dbp-site.com.

The forum also has special boards for helping out beginners - who can also get books specially written for DBP.

Where?

Here are some links about DBP you could find usefull:

• http://www.thegamecreators.com/
• http://forum.thegamecreators.com/
• http://darkbasicpro.thegamecreators.com/
• http://www.dbp-site.com/

Useful Files(s)

Currently I have only 1 usefull (nay, essential) file

Microsoft have taken it upon themselves to throw versioning to the wind and have released multiple sub-versions of DirectX 9.0c. Normally this wouldn't be a problem, however on top of that TGC made the decision to use the December 2005 edition of DirectX (although they keep mentioning Febuary 2006... Not sure why). Because of this, they suggest you download the latest "version" of DirectX 9.0c to gauruntee sucess. To do this - please follow this link... http://www.microsoft.com/windows/directx/.

Unfortunately, that file could be up to 52Mb. Thats pretty big, even by today's broadband standards. Through a little research (mostly on the Dark Basic Forum I mentioned above) I found out that there is actually only 1 file you need that you might not already have, so I suggest you follow these instructions:

1. Download the game and try it - who knows, it might work!
2. If it complains about a December edition of Direct X, try this:
   • Download the self extracting d3dx9_28 DLL archive
   • Extract and copy into you windows/system32 folder (usually c:\windows\system32\
   NOTE: I AM NOT RESPONSIBLE IF THIS BREAKS YOUR MACHINE.
   It shouldn't do any damage - all its doing is providing a new DLL for DirectX to play with
3. If that doesn't work, try getting either the DirectX Redistributable file (about 52Mb) or the web-installed which is much smaller and will only require you to download what you need to
4. If none of that works, please email me at njt1982 at yahoo dot com