September 17, 2001

Hello ! I've received a lot of e-mails from all of you (at least more than I expected !), and virtually all of them were about how I should keep the 3D engine. Most of the e-mails were very detailed so it's much warmer to me than a simple poll. So, yes, I won't be switching to 2D. I must admit, though, that yesterday I tried to implement some 2D inside the 3D core, and it was much harder than what I first expected. I made so many changes, improvements, bug fixes and other modifications to the 3D core that I can't just mix the 2D and 3D engines like I used to do before. On the other hand, it was a much welcome change because it took me much less time programming Kumika than if I had kept the 2D engine in the game. For those of you who still have difficulties with the 3D engine though, I'm working on a "2D Package" for 2D users that will be lighter than the Full Package (3.5mb) and will contain only the files needed by the 2D edition of Kyodai Mahjongg. It will be available on my website, and I'm looking for FTP or HTTP space to host the file, preferably with a download counter. I don't think it would be downloaded more than 1000 times a month. Another note of interest : I've tried the latest "Detonator XP" drivers from NVidia on my secondary computer's GeForce2 MX, and I didn't expect any performance improvement on Kyodai Mahjongg, but I was wrong. The configuration was : 1024x768x16, low-resolution textures, Windows 2000, and a Traditional solitaire game would work at an average of 160 FPS with drivers 12.41. After installing drivers 21.81 (XP), the performance jumped to an average of 170 FPS, which is not bad, especially considering drivers 12.xx were already quite faster than the old Detonator series. So, I'm recommending everyone who owns a GeForce video card (any type) to upgrade to the Detonator XP drivers available here at NVidia.com ! Now I just hope ATI will do the same kind of thing to their Windows 2000 drivers... I'd love to have some performance boost for my own configuration...