DarkBASIC Pro will go out of date as soon as the next DirectX with major changes is released... it's really as simple as that.
In terms of graphics you know have the basics at your fingertip that personally i'd tip for another 5years.
This generally seems to be the cycle speed of the innovative things, DirectX 3.0-8.0 (most never used 1 or 2) were essentially identical APi's and they were calling similar levels of graphics and using similar pipelines. When Microsoft believed it was finally time to upgrade all of thier old features and finally get rid of 2D Graphics because cards were geared more towards 3D, thus DirectX 8.1 was born.
The time it has taken the industry to move from Dx3 -> 8.1 has been around 6years, and no doubt until the next generation of cards that radically changes the APi it will be another 5-6years like consoles before we see DarkBASIC Pro looking age'ed.
At the end of the day most of the past and comming Dx's will simply upgrade speed for alot of operations based on hardware abilities and faster processor steppings, which means how a game looks and feels is 100% upto the artists you work with and your still as a programmer.
DarkBASIC is still capable of pushing out some nice stuff, however it just cannot compare speedwise ... even when it was released it couldn't compare speedwise to be honest.
Personally I think the next DarkBASIC will come sometime in 2005-2006, and it'll probably be programmed in such a way that allows for 3rd party plugins as well as open-ending the APi initilisation allowing it to actually utilise any Graphics APi there is, however setup for DirectX as Standard.
but then remember there is always far more to a good game than good graphics.
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