Some of you may have been wondering what is going on with Virtual Paradise, it has been a while since the last release on the 29th of December. The reason it is taking this long for a new version to be released is because I am working on some bigger changes under the hood. These changes are necessary to make it possible for Virtual Paradise to work better on more PCs.

Missing OpenGL drivers can be a problem for some Windows users when using VP. For example, the graphics drivers included in Windows Vista and Windows 7 do not include OpenGL drivers, only Direct3D. No driver usually means Microsoft’s OpenGL software rasterizer will be used, this slows down rendering so much that it is not really usable for any modern 3D application. VP will run at a frame rate of probably less than 5 frames per second, depending on the world contents and window size. While in most cases this can easily be fixed by installing a new driver, it is not something I want to require of everyone who wants to use VP. For this reason the next version of Virtual Paradise will have a Direct3D 9 renderer in addition to a OpenGL renderer.

In previous releases OpenGL was directly called from lots of places in the code. For Virtual Paradise to use multiple renderers, the code using OpenGL has to be abstracted from the rest of the code. This is not too hard to do, it’s just a lot of work. While doing this, I am also trying to clean up other parts of the code.

Right now, the Direct3D renderer is already just as functional as the OpenGL renderer but not all parts of the 0.2.x versions are implemented yet. Maybe I will upload a preview version later so you can see the progress.

See ya,

Edwin. 😀