September 18, 2000

It must be the season. After the GeForce 2 MX, I bought a laptop computer today. Actually I'd planned this for years, but I never could afford it. This time I saved enough money for it

And since my second PC broke down last week, I was somehow forced to buy a new machine -- so I chose a (relatively cheap) laptop. I'm very happy with it for now. Oh, by the way... I get about 40-50 fps in Kyodai with it. So, never consider that a laptop computer is not suited to play Kyodai in 3D. You just need the right video card in it

(in my case, a Trident Cyberblade chip...) As for the fleas, hopefully they're dead by now

I guess using more and more products finally finished them off. Phew. But never say never. I know they may be back in a few weeks. I'll be watching. Finally, back to Kyodai. I decided that it was time to move on to DirectX 7.0, just a couple of weeks before the official release of DirectX 8.0. I suppose that, by now, everybody has installed it and is happy with it. So Kyodai 14.42 will require DX7 and should offer (at least on GeForce cards) a nice speed improvement -- I don't know why, but now I get a framerate of about 116 instead of 96. Just by switch to the DX7 engine. Cool. Also, I've been working on implementing cubic environment mapping, a feature supported mostly by GeForce cards I think. And I'm pleased to announce that it works, and that it looks much better than Kyodai's current environment mapping feature

Strangely, it was easy to implement. But it took days to do, just because the feature is documented nowhere and I had to cope with just a couple of obscure C++ files and the DX7 documentation. But now everything's okay so never mind...