Upcoming Beta and Changes March 22, 2011

Since my last blog post, I have been spending a lot of my free time working on DaggerXL version 0.20. The plan was to work on the DarkXL Beta at the same time, but until this week my hectic schedule hasn’t let up as much as I originally thought. However I am once again working on the Beta release for DarkXL, with all the features discussed in the previous article. A release should finally be made within the next couple of weeks, assuming “real life” behaves for a while.

As for changes, I’ve reconsidered the goals of the Pure Renderer. While the prospect of having the GPU renderer display the game almost exactly like the DOS version is cool, and matches the original goals, it doesn’t really completely solve the problem. And that problem is that there are many people with older systems or newer systems with terrible GPUs and/or drivers that would like to use something like DarkXL but can’t due to under-performing parts, drivers or just the age of their GPU. So despite my original plans, the Pure Renderer will become a software renderer. It’ll still support the DOS-like mode (i.e. 320×200 8bit) but also support higher resolutions, 8 bit and 32 bit modes.

The Pure Renderer will share the mesh rendering and blitting code with DaggerXL (which is also getting a software renderer for the same reasons) but will, of course, use a specialized renderer for the sector geometry. With all that said, the hardware renderer will continue to be optimized and improved but this will give people another option. This means that fixed-function GPUs will not be supported (and they are not currently), but the Pure Renderer will be available instead.

This also means that DarkXL will have a software voxel rendering implementation after all as well. Though the current hardware implementation will remain of course.