October 15, 2002

Okay, the good news is, I recovered all of the data I lost on October 10... Good thing there are programs to "unformat" quick-formatted partitions. Now if only I could save the 20gb I lost a couple of weeks ago... The drive was so fragmented that all of the large files are unusable (sob). The bad news is, I'm nearly unable to work on Kyodai Mahjongg. Not that I don't want to. But my brand new Radeon 9700, which I hoped would fix the infamous Radeon 8500 "infinite loop" bug (which causes full PC crashes on Direct3D games at any random time), is actually worsening the problem... So, now the crashes even appear when Kyodai Mahjongg is minimized and only running in the background. And it used to appear only during the Game Selector screen. Now it happens in all mini-games as well. I tried a lot of things to get rid of the problem, and nothing works. I love PC's when they tend to crash even out of the box. At least, if you had a problem running Kyodai Mahjongg and other 3D games, you know you are not alone. Even a competent programmer who knows how these machines actually run can have such trouble. I've also heard that NVidia cards also had similar "infinite loop" problems, but only on VIA chipsets. Does anyone have a spare GeForce Ti 4600 board for me ?

Anyway, I'm concerned about something. If Kyodai Mahjongg wouldn't run on my machine, why should it run on yours ? I mean, it's not my fault (I'm getting crashes on all Direct3D games), but what if I simply switched to OpenGL ? "Simply" is an easy word though -- it would require rewriting the whole graphic engine. But I did just that in a few months back when I switched from OpenGL to Direct3D 6.0 in 2000, between version 10.21 and 11.00 of the game. Originally, I switched to DirectX because OpenGL wasn't widely supported on video cards at that time, but it has probably changed, because there are a lot of OpenGL-based games out there now, mostly using the Quake engine. Hey, even I was addicted to Anachronox at one point. (Never could finish it though, because it couldn't stop crashing after some time... Not because of OpenGL, mind you !) I'll try to be more straight-forward. Please try version 10.21 of Kyodai Mahjongg. I'm not asking you to tell me if it's better. It isn't. It's slow, it's not well programmed, not optimized, I was just a beginner in 3D programming. I'm really ashamed of that version. But it's OpenGL-based. If it works for you, then you might as well play the game in OpenGL in the future if the result is exactly the same. Plus, I could even try to make a Linux version of the game. Wouldn't promise anything though. I'm aware it wouldn't sell much anyway

And I've never been able to install Linux correctly

)) What I'm trying to say is, if you're having problems with the current DirectX (Direct3D) version, and the OpenGL version is working fine for you, then please answer the poll below. In any case, I'd like you to answer, I'd like to hear your opinions about what I should do. If I'm the only one having "infinite loop" and other crashes on Kyodai Mahjongg, then I'll just switch to a GeForce card and continue my work on the current version. Otherwise I'll have to delay it a bit. But switching to OpenGL could also help me simplify my code overall. I have to say it : DirectX sucks. Microsoft always claims their API is being simplified. Yeah, that's it. Simplified. Adding an assembly-language-based vertex/pixel-shader engine is not exactly my conception of simplification. (And, yes, I know OpenGL 2.0 will include shaders too) I'm not trying to "bias" you into voting for OpenGL, I'm not even sure I want to start again from scratch, especially because I'll probably have to reprogram the GUI and drop Voodoo 2 cards support, but I'm sick being forced to consider DirectX as my only "viable" option. I can do both. I already did. I like both APIs. I just chose DirectX long ago because most people didn't even have OpenGL drivers and couldn't run the game. For the first time in my life, I won't vote in a poll I uploaded here. I used to have an opinion on every question I asked. This time I don't. I'm open. So it's up to you. Make yourself heard

Feel free to e-mail me as well about the matter. (As always, I just want to remind you that I won't answer, but I will read your e-mails) Thanks !