JEO 31/46
//// 10 Jan 98
Apologiez for no updates for a few weeks - I have been a'bustin' my
buns to get a (very early) demo of my first Project X game ready for
CES, where it is now, along with various other bits of X-ish niceness,
being shown to privileged, fortunate souls who have been invited to
see what we've been up to all this time. After not a few late nights,
several gallons of tea, and much swearing and cursing at the keyboard
of my Penty I came up with something that I think looks well tasty,
not bad for about 4 weeks of work, and which has no pixels at all. You
can move your player around on the playing surface and blow away a
large herd of enemies into rather sweet- looking clouds of translucent
particle thingies, and it looks particularly nice with the lights off
and some kool techno music playing, as any game of mine should :-).
It's proving very difficult to slow the X-beast down. I keep chucking
in stuff that requires a totally ludicrous amount of number crunching
and bit-twiddling and the bugger just refuses to get slowed to a
crawl. This is really nice, and the opposite of what usually happens
when you get onto a new system - you get all fired up about how cool
the new system is going to be and dream up all this wonderful stuff
you're going to do, then discover that there are some serious
bottlenecks you'd not anticipated and end up having to let go of some
of your more outrageous ideas to keep the frame rate up. With X, I'm
getting more or less exactly the performance I had been expecting, and
I know I'll be able to shovel in the tons of enemies and wicked-o FX
that I had been imagining, and it'll keep up with my vision. It's
already doing a mind-numbing amount of stuff and having got the demo
together in a hurry, it's nowhere near optimized yet. There's still a
ton of slack in the system - I am probably not even using up 50
percent of the capacity as it stands. This is very reassuring, not to
mention exciting - when I think of the coolness and extreme niceity
I'll be able to put into even the tiniest details, it just makes me
slaver :-). Always before, one had to trade off on beauty to keep up
the speed.  With X, one can afford to err on the side of beauty. I
like it, lots :-)
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