XNA and DarkBasic

Question

What are the advantages of each over the other and is one easier than the other to learn?

Answer 1

Note: I develop with XNA and have never heard of DarkBasic until now.

XNA offers support for Xbox and Zune platforms and has a large community and is supported officially by Microsoft.

XNA documentation and tutorials are plentiful and many 3rd party sites and blogs exist around it.

XNA is in C# which I find much more intuitive as a programmer compared to VB.

After about 10 hours of reading and doing small tutorials for XNA I felt capable of coding nearly any type of game quickly and efficiently. I find the basic architecture very intuitive.

Answer 2

DarkBasic is older, based in basic which is probably not a great idea for non-students, and costs money, though very little. XNA is .NET based, generally C# based, and can target some devices like XBox and Zune. Personally, I'd recommend XNA over DarkBasic because you get very solid tools (IDE, debugger) from Microsoft. They're about similarly hard to learn.

Answer 3

As has been mentioned elsewhere, XNA allows easy development for the Xbox 360 and Zune platforms in addition to Windows. XNA also is built on top of C# whereas DarkBASIC seems to use a propriety BASIC-like language (as you would expect).

I'm not sure how crazy I am about the prospect of spending lots of time developing in a language of that sort, as I view my XNA projects as a way to sharpen my C#/.NET knowledge while learning the new XNA framework tools at the same time. (But that's just personal preference, of course.)

Unless there's some major upside to using DarkBASIC that I haven't seen, I would be pretty comfortable saying that XNA has an advantage over DB in almost every way.

Answer 4

As a beginner programmer, I've been learning DarkBASIC Pro on & off for the past year. I enjoy it and I wish I only started much earlier. I've got two sets of books to assist myself with DBpro;

"DarkBASIC Pro - Game Programming second edition" "Hands On DarkBASIC Pro" I & II All of which I can recommend if you're just starting out.

Also, if you are looking at coding in DarkBASIC, you're best to grab one of the newer IDE's, the most popular ones being either Synergy Editor or CodeSurge. Coding in the old original IDE is almost impossible once you've tried these new free ones.

With that, I can't comment on the advantages from one package to the other. I suppose it would depend heavily on what it is you're trying to do. But I do enjoy using DB Pro.

Answer 5

In my opinion, the main advantages of each system over the other are as follows:

1. XNA allows you to develop for more target platforms, most notably the XBox 360 game console. DarkBasic's target platform is limited to Windows PC, whereas XNA can produce games for both Windows PC and the Xbox 360 (as well as the portable Zune device, which as far as I understand is not a very popular platform).

2. It appears that DarkBasic allows for a greater degree of RAD (rapid application development) programming than XNA allows for. I partially base my assumption on viewing GameCreator's "The 3D Gamemaker" product, which certainly allows for RAD development (and actually, even no programming required!). I realize that "The 3D Gamemaker" and DarkBasic are not identical products; however, Dark Game Studio (which includes DarkBasic) is foundationally engineered on the premise of "Build game content with specialised tools".

3. XNA is in my opinion probably slightly superior as a development language. This does not affect the overall quality of the end product, but only the programmer and the development of the product. XNA is designed to be a truly object-oriented language and is based on the .NET framework which enforces object oriented design. As far as I know, DarkBasic does support object oriented practices with its SDK; however I do not know to what degree DarkBasic supports object oriented programming. Having said that, nonetheless DarkBasic probably does support object oriented programming to an adequate, if not great, degree.