Quote: "I think a lot of people now regard DBPro as, if not dead, then retired as a programming language."
I have been using DBPro for a long time. 12 or 13 years?
I've only ever used it as a hobby video game. Only a video game I was making myself. Every few months I'll get bored and play my game and add some levels, or a new type of gun, or a new enemy.
I had some incredible moments. Like the first time I wrote an AI. Up until that point characters in the game did not move at all. I wrote a follow AI all in one sitting without testing it. I launched it and it worked the first time. It was incredibly weird approaching another character in-game, having it look up at me, and then turn, approach and stop. Like breathing life into something.
I can't see it as a useful platform for a real commercial game past about 2005. There's an indie scene now that DBPro could have benefited from but, even an indie game needs DX10+ (or equivalent) plus someone competant at writing shaders.
Also Shaders:
I know that over the years we had shader packs and examples put out. The thing is premade shaders were never really something most people could use. You always had a situation where the Fur shader wasn't written to be compatible with a shadow shader you were using, or the light shader that you want to use has one too few lights to be useful, etc.
Just something I've been thinking about for a while.
Quote: "Many times I came across what I thought was a bug in DBPro source but after careful research
I found that DBPro is doing it correctly according to DirectX 9.0c documentation.
I think a lot of problems that are perceived are misinformation."
I'll agree I've gotten the sense this was the case quite a few times.
Quote: "
For instance I seen a lot of post over the years
about how slow DBPro is."
I once read a quote from Gabe Newell (from Valve Software) where he explained that a major benefit moving to DX10 was that DirectX 9 had issues with being flooded with draw calls.
That is to say the more draw calls your game has, the slower it is going to be even on vastly newer hardware.
It's been my impression that a major reason DBPro has low frame rates is because it is really inefficient with draw calls. Doesn't each object need a draw call? How do you get 1000's of objects in a screen an not tank the frame rate then?
Quote: "I'm still using DB and I don't think any of us realistically expected it to get officially updated anyway, although I'm sure we were all hoping for it. "
I remember people waiting for a DBPro sequel back in 2007. It isn't happening ever.
