Wednesday, February 23, 2011

Updates for 23rd February 2011

A busy day today; DirectQ got some more work done and RMQ got bumpmapping.

The latter was on request and we're just trying it out to see how it looks. It won't be an essential feature, but it's something interesting and fun to do while my mind is churning over some of the finer points of CSQC. I'm using my old trick of assuming that there's just a single light source and it's positioned at the player viewpoint, which is not as effective as real bumpmapping but is easy, fast and cheap to do.

I'm almost certain at this stage that the DirectQ 1.8.7 beta release will happen sometime tomorrow. Unless any last-minute crash bugs turn up, this is the space to watch. It's important to realise that it's a beta release, not the final product, so if your favourite feature hasn't made it or if you think you should be able to run it but can't, there's no need for panic. I would be interested in knowing about any problems encountered though. I can't promise a solution to everything, but if it fits in the general ethos of DirectQ and seems important enough, I can promise to give it my attention.

At this point I should probably remind everyone that from this release onwards DirectQ is going shaders only. You'll need fully D3D9 capable hardware to run it, so you might want to spend the price of a takeaway pizza if you don't have it. Note that this doesn't exclude Intels such as the 915, 945, 950, 960, etc; these are perfectly capable of running it and it will give great performance on them.

The upside of this is that a lot of the clunky old code paths required to support the fixed pipeline have been completely eliminated, and the whole thing is a lot more efficient than it ever was. I think that given that D3D9 is 9 years old, and capable hardware has been on the market for that amount of time, it's a fair trade.

The next post should be the release.

2 comments:

Baker said...

Fubruary?

I agree!

mhquake said...

You win this month's prize! :)