July 22, 2002

I'm so happy ! As you can see on the front page, Kyodai Mahjongg has received this year's Shareware Industry Award for best non-action game ! It means my little baby has finally been recognized by the industry actors. A long lost dream has come true (I'd been following the awards since 1997), and I'm a proud and happy man. Thanks again to everyone who voted for Kyodai Mahjongg ! It's been such a busy month again. Not only in real life (as usual since last May), but also for Kyodai Mahjongg, because I've spent the last two weeks rewriting the windows internal display code (combo boxes, labels, etc). I've still got a lot of work ahead of me before I can consider this done, but all in all, this will add several advantages to your little game. First of all, it will be much (much !) easier for me to switch to DirectX 8.1 then DirectX 9.0 this way. Then I'll be able to make a few special effects when showing or hiding the dialog boxes and other windows. I'll probably even try for some nice transparency effects. I've also been working on converting most of my DelphiX code to the Direct3DX helper library, which happened to be more of a hassle than a helper, but well, I guess it might help reducing the number of crashes some users have seen. And even if it doesn't, maybe switching to DirectX 9.0 will help. There's always hope... Or maybe someday I will become a good programmer and find all of the small mistakes I made years ago !