When I can give an advice, try both 3DGS and Dark Basic. I did that some years ago and began with Dark Basic, and changed to Gamestudio after 2 months because I found that everything, really everything, is a lot easier to code in Gamestudios C language than in Dark Basic. Normally a Dark Basic program has to be twice as long to do the same as a lite-C program. Of course some find Basic easier and want to pay that price, so try both. For my taste lite-C is easier to understand.

There are other things about Dark Basic that I did not like, it was a lot less stable than Gamestudio and you have to pay for many expansions like Physics that are already included in Gamestudio.