January 27, 2001

Hello. Here I'm going to try to give you some reasons for removing the 2D code from Kyodai. - DX8 is now a reality. Even DirectX 8.0a is out now. As you may already know, DX8 has removed support for 2D code. Not that you can't do 2D games with it -- it's just that you'll have to rewrite all your code to make it use it the 3D hardware. My 2D interface would be painful to convert to 3D, so I figured it was easier to use the current 3D engine to emulate 2D. The fact is that I want to convert Kyodai to DirectX 8 somewhere in the future. I did have much trouble with DirectX 7 though, so I'm going to do that carefully. - This week, I've been working on a 2D-only version of Kyodai 15.42... I've made sure to use DirectX 3.0 instructions, so it should in fact work on every machine with DX3 installed, including Windows NT 4. Which should let me remove the older Kyodai 10.21 from the Full Package. I'm very happy with this idea, in fact. Now NT4 users should be able to benefit from all the improvements that have been brought to Kyodai last year. - And finally, I don't enjoy programming in 2D anymore. As silly as it seems, it's the most important thing for me. Being forced to make everything 2D-compatible just makes everything harder to improve. Thanks everyone for answering the polls (you can still participate). The results show that less than 15% of the Kyodai user base wants to go back to version 15.42, and I guess they'll be happy with the 2D-only version, which I may or may not update in the future (I can't promise anything but I'll think of it). Gotta go back to work... Okay, maybe just some online surfing... I need some rest !