Monday, August 31, 2009

Testing Continues

I've been throwing a lot of heavy abuse at 1.7 trying to break it, and so far it seems as though it can handle anything I can come up with without even batting an eyelid. Even ultra-heavy firefights in SuperDuper Quake don't faze it, and the unlimited particle engine really shows off it's stuff there. When 5 or 6 Devastator (I think) blasts go off at once things really get impressive looking.

A few more last minute changes have crept in; I've optimized memory usage in alias model loading a little bit, added a peak usage counter to the heap_report command, and have switched lightmap handling back to 1.6.3 style for faster map loading and (sometimes quite dramatic) memory saving, as well as cleaner code.

64 bit lightmaps are staying gone though. In the end I don't think the improvement they gave was worth the overhead, both in terms of performance and in terms of keeping the code paths clean, stable and maintainable.

Still on track for a Wednesday release, expect it sometime during the evening (GMT). I think I'm going to class this one as "stable", despite the radical changes. But I'm really looking forward to letting you lot loose on it.

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