Look no further for an easier language to learn, DarkBASIC Pro (DBPro) is by far the easiest language in the market today. The language is procedural and not object oriented, it contains many of the "old school" BASIC commands such as DATA, RESTORE, GOTO, GOSUB plus many modern features such as pointers and user-defined data types. This language is even used in introductory programming courses in many educational institutions all over Europe because of its ease of learning.If you are planning to develop your own games for commercial purposes, it will be good to know that your games will be license and royalty free, and all games can be distributed as .EXE files with no need to have a runtime application.
In terms of power for developing games I can tell you that it is a very strong and fast language. You can witness its power by going through the many demos with source code included on the bundled CD as well as their website darkbasicpro.com.
Creating your programs is very simple using their Windows-based Integrated Development Environment (IDE), this is one of the many differences between this language and its little brother DarkBASIC.
What types of games can you create? mostly anything you can imagine: 3-D games, First Person Shooters (FPS) such as Quake, Unreal Tournament and Half-Life, Role playing games (RPGs), 2-D scrolling games (a la R-Type), Maze Games (Pac-Man), Multi-player, Online games, Educational, your imagination is the limit. There's even a best-selling professional driving simulation program developed in England using DBPro (http://www.thegamecreators.com/?f=dts), so you get the idea on the quality level you can reach using this relatively inexpensive development tool.
DBPro is not drag and drop, let's be very clear, but the language commands are intuitive and easy enough to understand for anyone without exposure to programming. To have an idea, I'll show you a 4 line program that creates a 3-D cube and rotates it on it's Y axis, something that would require hours using other programming languages:
MAKE OBJECT CUBE 1,100
DO
YROTATE OBJECT 1,OBJECT ANGLE Y(1) + 0.1
LOOP
The parameters that follow the commands (e.g. 1,100) are easily understood by simply looking at the context-sensitive HELP menu, summoned with F1 while highlighting the command (In this code example the 1 is the object number assigned to the cube and 100 is the cube size.)
There's a 30-day full-featured downloadable demo version of DBPro on their website. The HELP menu has all the commands available with brief instructions on their purpose. The full version has even working versions of code examples (showcase examples) for every command plus thousands of sample images, maps, sound effects, sprites, etc. to get you started real quick with your own games. I'd recommend downloading this demo to get a good taste of the language and determine if it is for you.
Make sure to download the DBPro patch from their website as soon as you install the CD, to have the latest and greatest release. The DBPatch can not be applied to the demo version though.
The only negative comments I have about this product is their language documentation included in the box. It could be more detailed and extensive. The good thing is that the DBPro community is growing and there are many resources for learning on the Internet. Amazon has a good introductory book on DarkBASIC (with some DBPro on it), ISBN 1592000096, but I think this book still lacks many advanced features since it was written mostly for DarkBASIC. If you are not familiar with 3-D terminology I would recommend to purchase an introductory book in this subject, or do an Internet search for this topic before getting your hands in the 3-D commands of DBPro.
Recommended for game enthusiasts, beginners and to-be professionals.
