


I personally grew to love both DB and B3D.
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Which was then a motivator for the Blitz team to introduce Blitz Plus and Blitz Max. B3D seemed a bit more polished, and I think that it was the main motivator for the DB team to introduce DB Pro. The two were direct competitors to each other and Blitz3D had been released around the same time as DarkBASIC. The speed was never an issue in my games, but rumors spread within the DB community that there's a slightly faster alternative, BlitzBasic. I even convinced my dad to purchase DB Pro for me.ĭarkBASIC was an interpreted language (although the Pro version later changed that). Programming had never been so much fun and productive for me. I managed to create quite a few 3D games with DarkBASIC, none of which have survived to this day though.
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A code editor, featuring its own BASIC programming language (which I was coincidentally already familiar with), and a freaking game engine! I could write code like PASTE SPRITE 1,100,100, hit F5, and behold there was graphics on my screen! Better yet, DarkBASIC had a 3D engine, and suddenly my game making abilities rose up in the sky - and with ease. I was in high school when I came across with this product called DarkBASIC. But I never could've predicted that in the future almost anyone actually can. It was my dream to being able to make my own game someday. Games like Quake and GTA were shaping the game industry back then. Can you guess what I was coding? Yeah, games of course! I've seen the ending of the DOS era (and oh boy some of those games were good), and witnessed the big change into Windows. It started with QBASIC when I was in elementary school, and continued with Visual Basic by the end of middleschool. If we accept and embrace the facts that: a) CoolBasic's target group is simply different, b) We shouldn't try to be the complete game making solution, and c) Raw performance in both graphics and general execution speed doesn't matter for a product like this, then it's possible that one day we might have a modernized, rewritten CoolBasic.Įven as CoolBasic will probably never be a serious competitor in game making industry, there is actually a new market emerging - the educational aspect. CoolBasic has never been a commercial product though, which would make it significantly more accessible to beginner programmers who desire making 2D games. The aforementioned products failed because they couldn't keep up with the demand (3D, x-platform) while still being commercial products. But I wouldn't keep expectations up either. The other reason is the required time and effort that goes into making a new CoolBasic.ĭoes that mean we'll never see a new CoolBasic? Absolutely not. This doubtfulness arguably hinders motivation. What purpose would CoolBasic serve if it can't compete technologically? If you take a look at products like Blitz, DarkBASIC or Monkey X, they are struggling too. What stopped those attempts then? One reason, is market domination by commercial game engines that are also very accessible something that wasn't a thing back in 2004. In retrospect, we probably should have refrained from publishing any information until we were absolutely certain that the reboot was going to happen. Previous versions of this website did set out some plans, and there has actually been more than one attempt to reboot the project. It would need a new game engine, new compiler, new editor, and documentation written from scratch.ĭespite the fact that nothing has happened for a very long time, we don't want to declare closure still. Nevertheless, recreating a modern version of CoolBasic is still a huge amount of work. Maybe CoolBasic shouldn't even try competing with performance or beasty graphics, but concentrate on its strengths i.e be the entry level.
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However, those game engines / studios may be very productive tools but they're not that good for learning how to start programming. That is one of the main reasons why we're reluctant to rewrite CoolBasic into a full-featured game making solution the bar is set so high that it'll be very hard to compete.

Technology and market is changing more rapidly than ever before, and small companies have a hard time catching up with products like Unity. The BASIC programming language suits very well for beginners, and when that is combined with a fairly robust game engine you get a product with which it's fun to learn coding. Over the years there have been many requests to revitalize the project.
