Ah, stupid me... I just fixed a terrible bug in Kyodai. I owe you an explanation. When I upgraded my development tools, before the Kyodai 14.00 release, I had to recompile my whole project and make some modifications, but I used an older (and buggy) file for MOD support, instead of the latest version. This explains why the Light versions for Kyodai 14.00 and 15.00 never worked for those of you who didn't have a copy of the mppsdk.dll file in your system directory. Sorry again ! The changes will appear in Kyodai 15.21 Light, of course...

Well, I'm at a turning point. I made some tests with earlier versions of Kyodai, compared to my latest optimizations, and realized that maybe switching to DirectX 7.0 did not bring extra performance. Maybe it was just my own optimizations. Maybe I'll give a try to the DirectX 6.1 engine again. I'm not sure about it, but what I know is that the only thing Kyodai would lose is its Cube Mapping feature, which looks fine but can be easily replaced with a similar (slightly slower) technique. For now, I need to know if the main thing that caused all the "Floating Point Division by Zero" errors did or didn't happen in earlier versions of Kyodai. In order to check this, just launch an older version and enable "High-Quality Stretching (3D)" in the Configuration menu. Then restart Kyodai and give me your results. If it doesn't cause a crash or anything, if Kyodai 14.00 is definitely more stable for you, then please tell me. One thing is sure for now : it's not switching to a different DirectX 7.0 engine that will fix your problems with Kyodai. The current one works fine. So the current poll about this is a bit useless now...

Last night I worked until 8:00am (!) to convert back Kyodai to DirectX 6.1, just to see. Well, the results are more than surprising. Basically, I've been able to retain the same level of performance as for the DirectX 7.0 version, but only if I enable multi-texturing. Usually, single-texturing is faster... I guess it's my video drivers' fault. I'll have to investigate on this. I'll try to post this week a public beta version of Kyodai 15.21 with both the DX7 and the DX6 versions for you to try and give me your feedback.

New poll on the site. Just tell me what's your problem with Kyodai 15.00, if you have any. Thanks to the commitment of a fan, Dan Levesque, who stayed online for 4 hours last night to give me his feedback on successive builds, I may have fixed the "Floating point division by zero" for Voodoo 3 cards, though. The problem is that I have no idea why it didn't work, and how I fixed it. I know where the problem appeared, but it was technically unthinkable to have a problem there. I'm probably crazy. If you're willing to test the fixed file, drop me a mail and I'll send you the link. Just unzip it into your Kyodai 15.00 directory and launch it. I cross my fingers !

Hi ! Poll results for now : Kyodai 15.00 works for most of you (except, strangely, Voodoo3 users), you want me to keep the current engine, and the sample I uploaded also works for you. So, my decision for now : I'll keep the current engine. I definitely won't go back to DirectX 6.1, but if the problems remain in the future versions, I'll try to switch to the sample engine.  Apart from that, I've been having problems with the latest beta drivers from NVidia (6.47 and 7.17). I used to have a performance of about 115 fps in 1024x768x16, and it dropped to about 65 fps with these drivers. Since several "small" programs that I have still worked at the same framerate, I figured out there were probably ways to optimize Kyodai even more, and started working on this. After a week of work, I managed to gain an impressive 50% of performance with these drivers ! Then I reinstalled the older drivers (6.34) and was a bit disappointed by the performance gain, which was still impressive (10% in 16-bit mode, 20% in 32-bit mode !), but not as impressive as with the latest drivers. Anyway, I kept working on optimizing Kyodai and finally managed to drop from 115 fps to a minimum of 130 fps. I'm really happy with it. Considering that the maximum performance I get with a minimal 3D scene is about 180 fps, I guess it'll be hard to get a higher framerate with my 144 tiles on screen...  I also fixed several small issues that I had with v15.00, notably the opaque particle system (now it should be okay for everyone), and the deformed Background Cube walls. This was a very strange bug but I figured out a fix which, at the same time, made me gain a few FPS I know this bug happened on several brands of video cards, but I was only able to test the bugfix on my laptop's Trident Cyberblade video card for now. I hope the fix will also work on other video cards.  Finally, I'd like to notify you, if you don't already know, that DirectX 8.0 has been released. Get it from Microsoft.com if you're willing to take the risk. The MS execs state that the DirectX 7.0 portion of DX8 has been improved (bug fixes and performance), so it might be interesting for all of you to get it, even if Kyodai doesn't require DirectX 8.0 for now. I've also downloaded the developer kit, and studied the new features. What can I say ? There are some nice new features, but overall, it would represent too much work to convert everything, and the gains wouldn't be obvious. There are already enough of you who have problems with DX7, I'm not going to switch to DX8 before I'm sure every major video card has its associated DX8 drivers. Plus, DX8 doesn't even include the software emulation that can be used by those of you who still don't have a 3D card (I should make a poll to see if some of your are actually using it...), so the whole thing might be easier to program, but I'm not sure if it's for everyone's taste...  Hey, that was a long update, wasn't it ?

Hello. Today I still have another poll for you. Please download this file (d3dtest.exe) and run it. If it works, you should see a cool 3D scene. I would recommend to set the "Ambient Light" slider to the right before clicking on "Start" though, otherwise you'll only see the particles. Thanks !

And here's another poll about the current DirectX version. This is your chance to tell me if you want me to go back to DX6, remain to DX7, or change my engine. By changing the engine, I mean keeping DX7 but using different tools to program. Currently I use a modified version of DelphiX, and I suspect it's this tool that causes problems for some of you. Switching engines would be time-consuming for me, though, but I'm prepared to listen to your inquiries.

Hello. I've added a poll to my website's front page, about the possible crash problems in Kyodai 15.00. Please try to answer it if you played both Kyodai 14 and 15. I'm currently working on the 3D animations in Kyodai. I wanted to add all the different 2D tile-removal animations to the 3D mode. So far the classic mode is finished. I'll try to add the other modes soon. Apart from that, well, I'm spending too much time surfing the Net. And I'm not very talkative these days. Sorry about that. The rest is fine.

Okay here's a small update. If you have trouble starting v15.00, you should try this beta version. Download this file and unzip it to your Kyodai 15.00 directory. Confirm to replace the existing Kyodai.exe file. Then launch Kyodai via the Start menu. Choose the "Kyodai 15.00 (Reset Options)" shortcut. Then, if you still have the startup problem, please drop me a mail and tell me what the splash text says ("Initiazing DirectX", for example). Thanks. If you don't have any problem, you can try this beta anyway. It has the tile-removal animation I was talking about below. But it still says "15.00", so don't consider this an official new version, it still needs work and the Clicks game is broken in it.

As I expected, a few people seem to have trouble with the latest version. This is because I switched from DirectX 6.1 to DirectX 7.0, which offers better performance and more features like cubic environment mapping.  The first thing to do is to make sure you have DirectX 7.0 installed. Then, check your video card drivers and sound card drivers to make sure they're compatible with this version. If they aren't, then you probably have some very old hardware and I wouldn't even recommend to play the latest versions of Kyodai. If you still have problems, you can download version 14.00 instead. It's up to you. For now, I don't have good reasons to go back to DirectX 6.1. Actually I have even better reasons to switch to DirectX 8.0 as soon as it's correctly supported on the Delphi development platform.  I hope everything turns okay for everybody in the end. I'm rather proud of my latest version, you can customize it as you wish, add more visual effects, and I'll do my best to keep adding more effects and features in the future. Stay tuned...