Compiling DB in VB 8 -- no hope :(

[Martin Howe]

Just for fun, I thought I'd try compiling DB in VB Express 2005 Beta 2. Heh heh :) I soon learnt the error of my ways.

Seriously, there are several changes under the hood and overall there were 104 errors and 33 warnings. Most of them seemed to be things like "Me = Nothing" when "Me.Dispose()" was expected and "MyTextBox="Hello"" when "MyTextBox.Text="Hello"" was expected.

There have also been several changes to mouse pointer handling. At least the code import/upgrade program comments each error with a help reference of why something that was OK before isn't any more, but no way do I know enough about GUI programming or Windows GDI to fix them myself.

Are there any plans to upgrade the code of DB to be compilable with VB 8 in due course?

[CodeImp]

A while ago I tried the same thing you tried, but with Visual Studio .NET 2003 (VB6 -> VB.NET source code conversion) and I also ended up with hundreds of errors. So I gave up all hopes and kept it a VB6 project. Theres nothing wrong with VB6, Doom Builder works fine (the few bugs in the latest version are my errors, the programming language works fine) so the only reason I saw to convert it is any possible performance improvements (not even sure if it will improve anything!), but I wonder if its worth the trouble.

Now about any possible performance improvements; If you fix all the problems and can get it to work, I really doubt if it will give you any improvements. There are many calls between VB part and the C part of the soure code (see the builder.dll C++ project) and in VB6 these calls are fast and flawless, but with all the Marshalling stuff I noticed in .NET, I really wonder if VB.NET can beat VB6 in this area. Also, the 2D rendering in the C part has direct access to the memory of the picturebox where the map is displayed. I wonder if this is possible with .NET at all.

I personally have no plans to convert the project to .NET anymore. If you feel the need to try this, be my guest, and let me know when you have a flawless working version ;)

[Martin Howe]

Sure, I understand; the reason for my asking was that people new to VB (such as myself) would only be able to buy the new compilers and thus will not be able to compile DB.

The reason that I had a go is because although I normally wouldn't touch the BASIC language with a barge pole, the Express betas are free and when released will be cheap ($50). I always wanted to have a go at hacking my favourite DOOM editor, but am not willing to pay money for a language that I hate just to do that :) Thinking about it, if there is a God, he alone knows what VB8 would make of the WinTex source :)

Then again, if there were a god and I were him/her/it, C or C++ would be mandatory for all the most popular DOOM utilities :)