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Newcomers DBPro Corner / graphics performance of dbpro?

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Cigaboo
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Joined: 12th May 2006
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Posted: 13th May 2006 04:21
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I will soon be trying the trial version of dbpro, but wanted to first get a rough picture from more advanced users in terms of it's graphical capabilities.

A couple things I've noticed:
1. Game examples I've seen seem low poly and have low res textures. I'm inferring this isn't just because the games are designed for low spec computers, but rather that the engine gets bogged down easily with polygons and textures?

2. I've heard several users complain via forum that more advanced shading can be difficult to acheive with dbpro (bumpmapping, ect..) Is it reasonable to create a surface with reflections in dbpro, such as a shiny stainless steel metal? Do you know of a good example of shading/reflectivity in a dbpro project?

3. Can dbpro display projects in high resolutions, such as 1280x1024 at 32bit color? Antialiasing?

4. Are there any other notable engine limitations I should keep in mind when creating a dbpro project?
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Cigaboo
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Posted: 14th May 2006 09:56
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I've now downloaded the trial. I see it can display higher resolutions. I should try stress-testing it graphically, I guess.

Another question- does anybody the optional extensions (NG Physics, EZ Rotate, ect...) particularly handy? If so, are there any ones in particular you couldn't live without?
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Octopus
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Posted: 16th May 2006 15:55
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The answers to basically all of your initial questions are simply, It depends how fast your PC is. I've noticed with the new patch for DBPro a dramatic increase in the speed of certain functions, and it's much faster (or at least as fast) as many of the other BASIC languages. (if used correctly)

Bump mapping and other mappings are very easy to achieve (just turned on with 1 command largely - you can find all the commands in the help files) altough again the speed for these commands will depend largely on your computer (mainly your gfx card)

Personally I have never needed to use any of the extensions. If you have a good knowledge of Physics you should be fine, otherwise plenty of people have done the work for you. I find you can always get the effect you want better if you write code yourself, but from what I can tell many of the extensions have been written very well.

In conclusion the best way to tell the limitations of DB is to load complicated objects, and use all the effects you want on them, then display the screen FPS.

Hope that answers all your questions.
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The Master
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Posted: 17th May 2006 00:14
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well have you looked at blue GUI i think you would like it

No Pain No Gain
DELL 800MHZ 1GB RAM PENTIUM 4 MICROSOFT XP SP2
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Cigaboo
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Posted: 17th May 2006 07:18
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Thanks for the responses, guys. As I've been experimenting with the trial, I'm getting a better feel for the performance/limitations of dbpro. On my computer, I found that about 50,000 polys can be used before things get bogged down. Of course this is an extremely flexible estimate I can keep in mind when modeling.
A couple new questions while I'm learning w/ the trial version:

1. Although there is a command for mouseclick, is there a command for mousedown? For example, if I want a player to be able to drag an image to a different position on the screen, I need to be able to tell if player is holding down on their right/left mouse button.

2. In a similar context, if I need an image to continuously paste at the player's cursor position, why doesn't this code work properly:

Do
Paste Sprite 1, mousex(), mousey()
If spacekey()=1 then exit
Loop

The Sprite did correctly position itself at the mouse cursor, but only did this once. Why, if it's in a loop?
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Cigaboo
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Posted: 18th May 2006 00:19
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I think I figured out the answer to my second question. I had a loop before this loop that also used the spacekey to exit. I guess the spacekey was still registered as 1 when it jumped to the second loop (this loop). I needed to give the program a pause between these loops to prevent this (so that the program would no longer see the key as pressed at the start of the second loop).

I need to get in the habit of testing things more thoroughly before posting on this forum. I'm sorta new to this whole programming thing
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