August 31, 2002

Hello everyone. We're just a few thousand visits away from the very symbolic 5-millionth visitor on Kyodai.com ! I still haven't received my trophy from the Shareware Industry Awards (I've already made some room on my desk for it...), and I'm watching the sun disappear into a crowd of clouds as we're slowly approaching the fall season. I'm excited like I've never been because I've heard that my all-time favorite show Saint Seiya is going to be revived next November in Japan (hey that was the show that inspired the name Kyodai after all

), and I'm struggling to find some free time to work on my game, after a one-week break following a rather successful beta session. That's all the news for now...

Ah, maybe you want to know more about what Kyodai Mahjongg is looking like right now..? Okay. I almost finished the new dialog box engine a couple of weeks ago, and quickly implemented the transparency effects I'd been talking about. Also, the dialog box shadows are now enabled by default since they're ten times faster than before. The windows overall look much better than they used to, and I'm really happy about the change. However, I'm not so happy about my switch to Direct3DX. Although it indeed makes it easier to start a game from scratch, KMJ is a 5-year old project and I just don't need the "ease of use" that D3DX provides. So I'm going to try to drop D3DX and re-implement the basic DirectDraw initialization routines. Anyone still listening ?

My to-do-list is growing day after day, which is not such a good thing, considering I'm implementing things slower than I'm adding them to that list. So the list just keeps growing and I can't see the end of it. Add to that my (long-lived !) plans to make another game based on the same engine, which I've never been able to realize because I had too much work on KMJ itself, and maybe I should just change my nickname to Sisyphus. That would explain everything, eh eh. Anyway, I just wanted to say hi and let everyone know that I'm still alive and still working every day to make sure you can enjoy as soon as possible the new features I've added to Kyodai Mahjongg. See you !