I've used it for a short while, and frankly it is utter crap. All of it. Dark Basic has NOTHING, and I mean NOTHING that you cannot achieve with DirectX/OpenGL and C++. Although it had harrowing limitations and is slow and inefficient. For anything other than small home-made game projects, Dark Basic is pretty useless in my experience.

The only good thing about it is that it is an extremely high-level language with everything built in, so it is ideal for impatient beginners because they can start with graphics and sound straight off with little effort.

DarkBASIC chucks out huge .EXE files. I mean 9MB for a simple spinning cube program :|

Home-made projects only ? DarkBasic is targeted for hobbyists, not for the industry... And it has a decent 3d engine... The tradeoff is speed and size. And that is the exact problem, if you are using a third party engine (in c++ as well) you will limited by the capabilites of the engine.
Also, DBPro is not suited for larger projects, but not because of the limitations, just because of the language. It is not designed for large teams working on the same codebase. If you have more than 2-3 coders, you will most likely have problems organizing the code and maintaining it.

But believe me, neither c++ or dbpro will bring you miracles. You need hard work, and determination to get a game running.

And DBPro itself costs £50... And this allows commercial distribution - but there are a myriad of addons, like physx, ai and many more, for more money.

I tried using DarkBASIC PRO for awhile since I used DarkBASIC awhile back making 2D games when starting out. Frankly DarkBASIC PRO really isn't worth the time and headace. I second on the file size! People have made small demos that are over 300mb... Try to learn one of the C Family Langauges or even Visual Basic.NET if you want to stick with BASIC. I suggest C++ with this engine, which is free: http://irrlicht.sourceforge.net/

I appreciate threads like this, as I was seriously considering purchasing either DBPro or the SDK, but after reading this thread and others on this subject, I decided against it.

I have recently purchased "Beginning C++ Game Programming" and it is a great book. I have several other C++ books, from "Beginning Visual C++" to "C++ Primer Plus", which is a great book. The Beginning book is very easy to read and lots of nice simple console based games to learn from.

I have also started to reread my "Teach Yourself Game Programming in 21 Days" again. I have read it at least three times, and this time, the code started to make sense to me. I tried the code out the first time I read the book and it didn't really click as to what exactly it was doing.

Although I am starting "over" so to speak with the "Beginning C++ Game Programming" and having read parts of the C++ Primer, I feel that I am starting to get a very good grasp on what parts of C++ I need to code games, instead convincing myself I needed to learn the whole language first. I am sure I will have to,but nice to get a grasp on the very basics.

Thanks for letting me rant! And, btw, I am 40!

DBPro was quite buggy even 2 years ago... It was quite different, but updates made it quite different experience nowadays.

The huge exe is just a side effect of the extension system. DarkBasic uses a number of 3rd party components, and by the default it packs every dll into the exe as a resource, therefore the binary will be quite large (5+ megs) and have option to store resources (bitmaps, sounds, etc) into the main exe. This can be fine tuned, however.
Btw, why dont try the 30 day trial version, and ask questions in their community forum ? There you might find someone, who actually made a <completed> game with DbPro ;) I would say that their support is top-notch.

http://www.thegamecreators.com/ and click community.

Tom