@~Two 'techy' bits this issue, the first one is:
                 Dark Basic (Demo version)

                  Reviewed by Graham Raven

I'm a would-be games programmer. I have lots of marvellous ideas
(honest!) but lack the humongous brain power needed to understand
all those incomprehensible terms which constitute modern
programming language. Being terribly ancient, I remember Basic,
(ah those were the days!) and with this in mind I have perused
Visual Basic in the hope of making the world's best epic RPG.
Visual Basic can't be so very different from old Basic can it?

Ah we live in modern times aged one. These days everyone from the
plumber, car mechanic, office worker, probably even the loo
cleaner has learnt to speak special languages in order to enhance
their status in life. If you can talk for 15 minutes to someone
who isn't a fellow initiate of your own special 'profession', and
leave them utterly in the dark as to what it was you were on
about, ah, that does your ego no end of good! Everyone who's had a
modern education knows perfectly well that anything which is quite
incomprehensible must be devilishly clever, and is therefore,
impressive! Hence the need for jargon!

So far I've failed badly with Visual Basic I fear, I just can't
accept that pressing a key or clicking the mouse is termed
'activating an event procedure'! I hate jargon, so much so that it
blinds me to the real information. Are the people real who write
this rubbish I wonder? I suppose it depends on what you are trying
to achieve.  Is the manual written to teach you something, or is
it there simply to show off how clever the author is? I seriously
wonder sometimes.

Visual Basic was however the best language I'd found so far. 'C'
gives you migraine and takes eternity to learn. I've read Pascal
manuals and have ended up with the same impression that I got from
TADS; both made my head hurt! I have also bought any number of
programs like the DC Games Builder, all of which promise that even
a turnip can easily and quickly program games!  I think the
authors were actually thinking of the giant three headed alien
space turnip all of whose heads hold a brain the size of
Southampton, and which does really difficult calculus problems
whilst it's asleep by way of passing the time. I must say that I
did like the DC Games program actually, it just didn't quite do
some of the things that I wanted it to do.

Have I given any of the above all my intense and undivided
attention until I mastered them? Not in the slightest I fear,
miserable failure that I am. I'm just not willing to put that kind
of effort in to something which might not be able to do exactly
what I want it to.

Then I read about Dark Basic in Issue 65 of SynTax. "Oh no!" said
my son Mike "We've done this before and every time these wonder
programs turn out to be a complete waste of time. They never do
what they say they can do, they're supposed to be idiot proof and
they're not, and they never, ever do what we want!". I agreed with
him 100%, and then asked him to visit the Dark Basic site and
download the demo program and the manual.

Due to pressure of work it was a couple of weeks later that I
finally managed to sit down and try the demo program out. There's
half a dozen or so demos to try out, all of which come complete
with source code. The demos are good, and the source code is, erm,
stunningly brief! "You mean to say you can achieve all that with
just that much code?!" It certainly seems that way!

Worryingly impressed I went away and studied the manual. It
couldn't be true could it? I read and I read, and I was even more
impressed. There was no jargon, no sign of 'activating event
procedures'. The manual assumed that you had virtually no
experience of programming at all, and yes, even a fool could
indeed make sense of it. Briefly, and simply you were told
everything you needed to know - and it didn't take a million words
to say it either, unlike some manuals I could mention. I was left
with the feeling of "Why on earth do other languages use such
jargonistic drivel and needless complication, when it can be as
simple as this?"


Dark Basic does virtually everything you can think of, and does it
easily and simply. Never mind incomprehensible theory, you are
told which key to press and which commands and code segments you
need to achieve 'such and such'.

An hour later Mike asked me what I thought about the manual. I was
a little embarrassed to quietly say "Um, I er, understand it."
"What, all of it?"

"Er, I know it's impossible, but yes, I do. I've been unable to
find anything that I can't make sense of, and that at my first
reading!"

Mike didn't believe that it could be as easy as it seemed so he
had to sit down and read the manual too. His conclusions were that
it is very much like Quick Basic in terms of simplicity, but has
3D graphics as standard, and lots and lots more! Virtually
anything you can think of that you want to do graphically or
sound-wise, is simply achieved. We both spent days trying to think

up effects that the program couldn't create for us, and we
couldn't!

So there you have it. If you're into programming or would like to
be, and want a genuinely uncomplicated language to use, which can
make virtually state-of-the-art games, far more easily and quickly
than any other language - get your hands on Dark Basic.  The full
price is œ45 but you can down load the demo version freely from -

http://www.darkbasic.co.uk/home.html

Now all I need is œ45 and my old P100 upgrading to a 233 and a 3D
graphics card adding - and the sky should be the limit!

Rating: Hey Woo! (and then some!)




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