I'm still making a lot of progress on the game. I've recently fixed a bug that was nagging me...the loading screen wasn't displayed correctly on some NVidia hardware. I fixed that as well as added a % progress indicator on the bottom of the loading screen so people can see how it is progressing. It does take a little while to start the game up. I've got close to 400 MB of assets now.

I'm about to start rewriting the game's package system to support encrpytion and compression. This will make the load times a little longer. But hopefully I'll be able to make it more efficient than the old package system, which is pretty slow and doesn't support either compression or encryption. At the moment, for simplicity, I'm not using any type of package system...my files are just sitting in their directorys.

Last night I started tweaking the game on one of the new NVidia cards I just bought, and I've just about got the "fallback" rendering code working right...for computers that don't support multiple render targets, or PS 2.0.

I also spent a few hours redisigning and rewriting the entire city vertex buffer creation & rendering code. I've gained about a 30% speed increase...the game runs a lot smoother now, and the animations all look good. Even on a low end ($300) computer with an embeded video chip.

I've also been stress testing the game servers/master server and everything is standing up fine. Hopefully I'll get the servers live on the internet soon, and get everything setup in that office in the next few days.

Alright I've still got a lot to do, so back to work [grin]

- Dan