Hi Timo,

yes, we used your public dll plugin, therefore you're in the credits, I hope you don't mind . Keep up the excelent work!

For those of you who wonder about the technical details: Damonica was made about a year ago. We couldn't use compressed textures, no reliable multitexturing shader was available (FYI just the models used for terrains use about 80 MB), there was no reliable bone animation (so each vertex-animated character can take up to 8-10 MB), once allocated assets (bitmaps) could not be removed from the memory, for a panel to have solid background the backrground's uncompressed picture had to loaded into the memory etc. (Other than that - the scripting I did could be better, but I guess no one's perfect and there really isn't an additional Sleep instruction so that you have enough time to really apreciate the beatifull loading screen ).

I'm not very familiar with the latest A6 versions but from what I've seen and tested (using DDS does indeed make a difference) a great step forward was made and some 90% of our problems have been solved. If we were to make the game now, not only would the loading be faster - there would be _no_ loading at all (except the initial one) because all this could fit in memory and many things would work and look better. But such is the life...

As a sidenote - let me just say that I think that the update system that 3DGS uses is very unfortunate. For example: you can see on beta pages that dds support is available. You know that if you used it, it could have extreme impact on how your game works and looks like. But the fact that the dds is available in beta is useless - you can't really be sure if it comes out in weeks, months or even a year and you have deadlines you have to meet with the publisher not giving a damn if your engine is ready or not. I think it has been said numerous time - "use only what is really available". Unfortunately it means that if such a small but critical feature as dds becomes available in beta, you can start to use it say half a year later, making it even harder for the engine catch up with the latest technology (not that dds is anything new ).

In my opinion, if a feature has been tested and is "ready to go", it should become available as soon as possible. There should definitely be more smaller updates. I know if it had been this way, Daemonica would have looked - and to some degree played - better.

Just my two cents...

EDITED: oops, I seem to hijack my own thread. Sorry...