February 13, 2003

It seems unbelievable, but YES, the new version is nearly finished. It will definitely be released by the end of the week. On the video card front, ATI released Catalyst 3.1 drivers for their Radeon cards. If you have one of these, you should definitely get them. With high-resolution textures and Realistic Tiles enabled in 1024x768x32, performance in v18.75 jumps to 294 FPS (!), and performance in the upcoming v19.00 jumps to 364 FPS !! And the game is still playable (38 FPS) when enabling the "My card is worth two cars" and "6 samples multisampling" options. It just looks awesome. Okay now I actually need to think about putting vertex shaders and pixel shaders in the game, somehow. I have absolutely no idea what nice effect to do with them, but the game is so fast now, I just have to include something more in it...