Kyodai Mahjongg

It must be the season. After the GeForce 2 MX, I bought a laptop computer today. Actually I'd planned this for years, but I never could afford it. This time I saved enough money for it :-) And since my second PC broke down last week, I was somehow forced to buy a new machine -- so I chose a (relatively cheap) laptop. I'm very happy with it for now. Oh, by the way... I get about 40-50 fps in Kyodai with it. So, never consider that a laptop computer is not suited to play Kyodai in 3D. You just need the right video card in it ;-) (in my case, a Trident Cyberblade chip...)  As for the fleas, hopefully they're dead by now :-) I guess using more and more products finally finished them off. Phew. But never say never. I know they may be back in a few weeks. I'll be watching.  Finally, back to Kyodai. I decided that it was time to move on to DirectX 7.0, just a couple of weeks before the official release of DirectX 8.0. I suppose that, by now, everybody has installed it and is happy with it. So Kyodai 14.42 will require DX7 and should offer (at least on GeForce cards) a nice speed improvement -- I don't know why, but now I get a framerate of about 116 instead of 96. Just by switch to the DX7 engine. Cool. Also, I've been working on implementing cubic environment mapping, a feature supported mostly by GeForce cards I think. And I'm pleased to announce that it works, and that it looks much better than Kyodai's current environment mapping feature :-) Strangely, it was easy to implement. But it took days to do, just because the feature is documented nowhere and I had to cope with just a couple of obscure C++ files and the DX7 documentation. But now everything's okay so never mind... :-)