A Good Friday

Another very quick week for me, and ending on a high with the final build of V1.071 for Friday which is pretty cool. More performance, better A.I, more stability and generally oozing goodness. My interview went well, and I very much enjoyed the questions. Might do another one in a few months when Reloaded is further along!  It's now over to the internal alpha testers to punish the V1.071 build to see if we missed any show stoppers. One fix I did make which I thought was pretty long overdue was the IDE now detects if there are any old FPSC-MapEditor.exe instances running and terminates them before starting. This avoids the issue of FPSC Reloaded launching and then just sitting there in a frozen state. You should no longer need to open Task Manager to restore your session - at least that is the theory.

Not decorating the house this weekend so will be hanging around the forums to see how everyone is getting on and answering questions where I can. Going to potter in the garden and recharge my battery a little, but next week should be another very cool week as we take our two-compounds level and take it to the MAX. What that means precisely I will reveal in the weeks to come, but I think you will approve and it is definitely the right thing to do at this stage. We don't just want a GOOD result, we want a GREAT result, and we have a plan to deliver this.

Before I forget, when you get your mitts on the V1.071 hot fix, check out the new sliders in the Shader Panel, I think they are pretty cool and might be responsible for some serious performance improvements if you have the right kind of GPU.

Okay so I could not wait until the release. As you can see you can control the transition distance which tells the shader precisely when to use the cheaper fragment code to boost your FPS.  If your GPU handles IF branches a certain way, you will see a leap in performance when you reduce the slider to bring the cheaper pixels closer to the camera!

Anyhoo, have a great weekend everyone and we'll report the findings of our testers next week, and hopefully reports their elation too!