Updates on status

[raefer]

Camberley and I have been working hard on a new version, trying to fix some aesthetic issues with the fish animations to make them feel "better" in certain situations. Reworked the turning somewhat, modified the water physics, and some changes to support this in the fish AI. Overall, I think they feel smoother and less stiff when they move and turn now, and more, well, koi-like.

Also, we're working on adding in some of the other animations that we did a while back but didn't have time to get into our initial release.

Furthermore, several people have mentioned the jagged edges sometimes visible around the pond's edge as an aesthetic issue - this is an error in the "depth buffer" used in 3D rendering. I originally turned off 24/32 bit depth buffering (which eliminates this issue) because it caused problems on some cards. So now I finally got around to putting in a forced 32 bit depth buffering option, which eliminates the Z buffer artifacts at the pond edge (at the cost of some performance). Some graphics cards don't like mixing 16 bit color depth with 32 bit depth buffers, so this option may require some tweaking (and that's why it's under "Advanced").

Hopefully you'll see the new version in a day or two, as soon as we've done some more testing.

Next on my list (over the next week or so) is the sound issues some people have been having - the sound is still not working under 98/ME last time I checked, and a few people have reported nasty noises coming out of their speakers in Win XP (this one is a mystery to me).
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Raefer Gabriel

[raefer]

The new version, 1.0rc11 is now available for download on our download page. https://screengardens.com/download.html for the lazy.

It DOES address the depth buffering issues (the jagginess at the pond edge), and has some fairly substantive aesthetic changes to the turning and fish animation. We like the changes, and hopefully you will too. As always, though, the fish have a mind of their own, and sometimes do things that we don't anticipate - so let us know if you see anything crazy happen.

Check out the new settings options if you are curious. Also, we added a new option to turn off the automatic NumLock activation, since this causes serious annoyance on some laptops and certain keyboards where the numeric keypad overlaps with the other keys.

We have NOT yet fixed the sound issues some people have been reporting, but that's next on the list of issues.
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Raefer Gabriel

[paoloc]

"Also, we added a new option to turn off the automatic NumLock activation, since this causes serious annoyance on some laptops and certain keyboards where the numeric keypad overlaps with the other keys"

My laptop thanks you, Raefer.

I'll try the new version soon