Quote: "why are we doing this again?"
Do you want the serious answer, or the real answer?
Seriously speaking, I'm trying to find out how many people currently are using which Windows XP.
For example Windows XP Service Pack 2, provides .NET as part of the Service Pack. So those people who are using that particular OS will be .NET 1.1 Compliant.
If there are enough Dark Basic / Dark Basic Professional users currently capable of using .NET and DirectX 9.0c (which Dark Basic Professional itself technically only requires 9.0, it just says 9.0c on the site so we don't get people moaning with the more obscure commands. Just like Dark Basic technically used 7.0a but it says 8.1 on the site to make sure we don't support Windows 95 still)
What I hope is there are enough users here, with sufficient specification to warrent utilities that use .NET 1.1.
It also would help to know which Processors and Ram are being used (from an Engine point-of-view) to see if it warrents the Physics Engine(s) also having SSE instruction sets, as this does add quite a bit for work (for ODE atleast) to set up the Matrices and Vectors to utilise SIMD.
That alone could take a week of work, yet the reward would be over 8x as many objects could be used in Physics calculations as current can. (which I would adivce with ODE around 100 objects with 4 contact objects)
I firmly believe in moving to .NET Technology as this would provide better security and more stable libraries to work from. (it also means I can play in C# more
)
It also means that the technology developed now with it, will be perfectly compatible with Vista next year. Not to mention instant useage of 64-bit Processing without recoding applications.
Effectively future-proofing software so it doesn't have to be specially patched or redeveloped.
As a .NET use I'm sure you can fully understand what I mean.
