It's been a while since I last posted but Space Crusade has not ground to a halt... it's just been going really slowly as I haven't had the competition to drive me.

I have still not been working towards anything specifically Space Crusadey. I've mostly been tweaking my window manager: layouts are easy to create now and are far, far more intuitive than - just off the top of my head - Swings.

I've also done a fair bit more with my Direct Input libraries (as driven by the eventing I need for my components). As I basically haven't worked on them since 'varsity they we're icky and inconsistent but look much nicer now.

More importantly is that Dave has dug up a Space Marine for me - you can see the squad in the screen shot below... and ... this is where life got interesting. Each marine is only about 7000 polys and they were rendering significantly slower than they should have. So whilst installing the NVidia debugger - to find out what's wrong - I bascially stuffed up my computer and only re-installed it last weekend. All is coming back to normal but that put a significant dent in my development time.


On an unrelated note the XBox 360 has finally been launched in South Africa and I attended on Friday. As this is the first time I've actually seen a running 360 I must say I was a bit disappointed. I would be hard pressed to tell the difference between the later XBox games and the new XBox 360 games. Microsoft really did release this console prematurely - I remember when the PS2 came out is was streaks ahead of anything PC's could do at the time but with the 360... well my PC looks better and has less annoying load times.

It wasn't all bad though - I bought myself a 360 PC controller and have been happily MAMEing ever since. And on that note I'm going to see if I can't beat the third stage of Dangun Feveron on a single coin.

Later,
Andrew