February 12, 2000

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 !