No, Beta 6 isn't ready yet. Just wanted to point out a small bug in Beta 5 : if you select 2D mode and restart Kyodai, it will crash. The workaround is to delete the Kyodai.ini file, as always... Or switch to 3D. If you want to play in 2D mode, don't forget to switch to 3D before leaving the game. The bug was fixed a few days ago but I forgot to tell you. Well, that's all for now !

Hi there. Today, Kyodai was selected as Game of the Week on the Matrox 3D Gaming page. I believe this is the first time Kyodai is ever mentioned on a major company's website, apart from the companies specialized in software libraries. Plus, their G400 card is so cool (except for OpenGL, but well I switched to DirectX, remember ? )...  I'm currently trying to finish Beta 6 for next week. It will hopefully have fullscreen support. I was able to play in fullscreen today, so Voodoo owners may start to be happy again... Also, I've speeded up the resizing process, avoiding reloading textures when I don't need it. I've been reported that Kyodai has a minor problem under Windows 2000, if you're using a G400 card : the bump mapping feature won't work and will generate an access violation. I'm not sure if it's my fault or the drivers' fault. Anyway. Apart from that, I'm glad to see there are so few bug reports ! It's a hard work to make sure I'm not adding more bugs when adding features, because DirectX is still a hard library to master. Phew !

Only three days and already a new beta ? Yup. I've been working a lot on improving the Bump Mapping support, and, wow, it really rocks now. Also, I've fixed the bugs reported after the release of Beta 3. Well, I haven't got much more to say, except that you really should start downloading the Beta if you haven't tried the Beta versions before, because it's more and more stable, and on my computer it doesn't crash anymore. Bye !

And here it is, the 3rd Beta version of Kyodai 11.00, and possibly the last one ! I'm rather satisfied with the current results. It's fast, it's beautiful, and it's less and less buggy ... I wanted to release it a few days ago, but I was too busy playing FF8 PC... I was a big fan of FF7, and I must say that this one is pretty cool too, apart from the story which is much less fascinating so far. Oh, yes, you can vote again for the "OpenGL vs Direct3D" poll. I've reset it to zero. I think that this time, the Direct3D engine is completely "safe" and should work on all cards. (Well, maybe not on an old Voodoo 1, but who knows... )

Wow, 12 days without an update... This has to be one of the longest silences ever on my site ! I even got a few mails from readers who suffered from news-withdrawal... ))  Well, basically, I was really busy. First, in real life, I've got two funerals (relatively distant family), a really cute cat (we still can't find a name for her... So, for now we're calling her "Le Chat" -- the cat), and the first two seasons of Babylon 5 on video. As a DS9 fan, I've been longing to watch this series for a long time. Now I've seen a selection of the best episodes from these seasons and I must say that I've fallen in love with this "competitor" of DS9, especially the episodes The Coming of Shadows and The Long, Twilight Struggle. Season 3 should be released around March 8 in France, I can't wait to buy it...  Now, in computer life... Kyodai is very playable and suffers from very few bugs, but unfortunately, when Z-Buffer is enabled, 3D still refuses to work on my i740 machine. Not only that, but I received and installed a G400 card, and it suffers from the same problem. But when I use its updated drivers, the bug disappears ! So I reinstalled the default drivers and tried to fix the bug myself... But I can't seem to find it. As the Beta 1 version (using WDirectX) works perfectly with these drivers, I'm thinking (again !) of switching back to WDirectX. But maybe not completely, maybe I'll do a "mix" between DelphiX (for 2D, audio and network) and WDirectX (for 3D). I even thought of trying QuadrupleD again (it's another Japanese component for DirectX, only available in English, but it gives good results, and it even has a fast Immediate Mode library based on the Retained Mode structure...), but I found out that it had the same driver problem on some specific samples (namely the Primitives sample that uses 3D to emulate 2D Alpha blending and rotation, for those who tried it). It's really a pity that DelphiX has such a strange bug, because apart from that, it's a fantastic component. I even posted a message in (poor) Japanese on Hori's forum, but I haven't got an answer yet. Sob.  So, basically, I'll probably spend the next few days trying to mix WDirectX and DelphiX together to get good results. If it doesn't work, I'll stick to DelphiX. Indeed I've found a temporary workaround for the driver bug, by making sure that if Z-Buffer is disabled, all the games remain playable without visual artifacts. This workaround will probably remain in the final version, anyway, because disabling Z-Buffer gives really fast results. Oh, by the way... I'm really impressed by that G400 card. The speed difference with the TNT2 is not noticeable, and I just love the bump-mapping feature. Only so far I haven't managed to implement it in Kyodai, but I'll try again in the future. Bye !