Thursday, March 5, 2009

1.6 Begins!

I didn't think there was anything major left, but I've remembered that there was quite a bit of work on the Input system outstanding. So far I've added in support for the XBox 360 Controller, which I had been threatening to do for quite some time. A menu is also available to configure it. I'm also going to add a menu for Joysticks. One nuisance here is that the 360 controller will also be caught by the regular Joystick API (and by DirectInput, so that's no way out), so they're exclusive; if you have a 360 controller attached (or any other XInput device) you can't use a Joystick. Microsoft provide code to detect this and handle it, but it's messy WMI stuff, so I'm happier with the simpler (but admittedly less flexible) approach.

I think particles are also going to make it into this release.

In Real Life, I'm going to be moving to a development job in a few weeks time. This is an exciting and interesting change after 3 years away from one, but it does mean that I'll be coding for a huge chunk of the day even before I get home to look at DirectQ. I know from past experience that this isn't a healthy situation, so hence the fact that I said in my last post that I'm going to be slowing down the engine.

If I have something releasable before I move I'll release it then, but I'm not going to be rushing the engine and doing lower quality work on it just to meet that objective.

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