if you wanted to make a game based on features that only exist in DX9, then there's no need to worry too much about gamers that don't want to upgrade.
I don't think anybody is. Worrying about that, that is. People are worry that they have to make DX9 a requirement, even if it will still run on DX7 generation hardware (and thus would work perfectly well with DX7). And they cannot blaim only you, but they must blaim every other programmer, because almost no programmer works on Win95 anymore.
It is not a matter of blame. It is a matter of not being able to sell to these people for no good reason. Elitism aside, ofcourse. Well, considering BRL has products covering older DX version, I see absolutely no point in adding pre-DX9 support to BMAX. Why?
Well there are tons of reasons, one being that nobody wants to develop for DX7 *only*, nor are they likely to want to go back to procedural programming. The choice between DX7 vs. Mac market, is pretty much a no-brainer. (Mac market every time, incidently). However if one could do both, that would clearly be the way to go. Why? Just think about it, if it has taken this long for Mark to get BMAX to it's current state, and now adding DX9 support, imagine how long it would take for him to add support for older (sucky) technologies that are irrelevant.
First of all, DX7 is in no way "suckier" than DX9, and second of all, it's not quite irrelevant. Oh and incidently, it takes three times as long to write a compiler as it does an application, and since BlitzMAX development time has been mostly on the compiler, I'd say "not as long as you seem to suggest". There are still millions of Win95 machines out there and I would like to have my games run on those machines.
Yeah. What was it, 36% of everyone who downloaded 3DMark2001? Hey, so who's gunna create a Max2D software renderer, for starters?
MildredMAX? :o> I don't have the luxury of being able to throw sales away because my customers don't have the latest and greatest machines.
True. But not everyone using BlitzMAX is doing so from a commercial standpoint. And I can see why they couldn't care less about DX7. It's the same mentality as another product out there: Who cares if it only works on my machine and crashes randomly on everyone elses. I g07z 50m3 m4d 5h4d3rz, L0L!!!1!! Wasn't part of the point of Blitzmax to give the people asking for fancy features access?
Well the reasons are individual I'm sure. Personally it's mostly a matter of cross platform capability and object orientation. If I wanted to mess around with the internals of the API anymore, I would be doing it in C. Why bother when a whole game in Blitz is fewer lines than setting up and opening a DirectX display in C?