November 12, 2000

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 ?