1. The
debugger needs extensive fixing (and testing!). I suggest that you get it to a state where it can be used to step through the FPSC source code, *and* all of the examples that come with DBPro. The debugger also needs some way of accessing type fields, arrays and local variables. The debugger currently seems to show only globals - which makes stepping through and debugging functions very difficult. The ability to execute statements which are inside "nested subroutines" would also be very handy - plus it would solve the aforementioned variables and ararys issue (when you attempt to view an array, the debugger would just generate the appropriate DarkBASIC code, sent it to the compiler and print the results)
2. The
animation commands do not seem to work properly (SET ANIMATION SPEED and SET ANIMATION VOLUME in particular). These need to be tested with all the different video formats supported by DBPro (fair enough - this will vary depending on the PC, but I mean for the formats listed on the box).
3. Please look into reworking the extraction of plugins system as I mentioned in the chat on Dec 23rd (and which you agreed with - something about loading DLLs from/into memory directly I seem to recall)
4.
Shadow Casting is very slow and very buggy. Sometimes it will work, other times the shadow polys will appear in mid air or split up on the ground as if someone has taken a hammer to them. I know that you can make the shadows faster using the same technology because I have at least a couple of tech. demos sitting on my hard drive which can do this.
In addition, shadow casting and reflection shading cause nasty black banding on some graphics cards, I believe this might be related to the fact that the stencil buffer on my laptop's graphics card only has a depth of 8 bits.
5.
Tabs in #constant precompiler directives still cause problems. DO NOT use the default editor to test this because the default editor replaces tabs (chr(9)) with spaces.
6. The
compiler does need some performance tweaks. I realise that it is never going to be as good as VC++, but there should not be such a significant performance difference between DGSDK and DBPro. Improvements here would benefit FPSC, so this, to my mind, would make sense both from a commercial perspective and a user support perspective.
BlueGUI:Windows UI Plugin - All the power of the windows interface in your DBPro games.