December 27,1998 Aww, yeah! My raytracer is much faster now and it does reflections and specular highlights. Squashed Bug of the Day: overflowing the fp stack spells trouble (lots of NaNs). Watch for sample ray-tracings on the artwork page.
December 26,1998 Hope you all had a pleasant Christmas. I am offering my services as an assembly programmer for speeding up Euphoria routines. If you have a small bit of code that you want converted, or a very specific idea of what you want, I can probably code it for you. Lately, I've been redoing my raytracer in asm (because Euphoria fp is painfully slow) and maybe I'll add reflections this time around. Here's a sneak preview... its very fast :-)
December 22,1998 Okay, Ralf. You've been a good boy this year, so I've added to Neil all that was on your wish list: support for switching between multiple command lists, flipped arguments to display_image (I never use it anyway), sub_screen accepts a sequence. I also fixed a very nasty (causeway nasty) bug in the rle-sprite collision detection - run gamedemo.ex to see it in action.
December 16, 1998 Neil updated yet again. Added wait_retrace and fixed another bug (thank you Ralf). School is out for Christmas break, so it's sleeping in late and playing Zelda III - what a way to relax :-)
December 5, 1998 Neil bugfixes finally. Fixed sequence sources in new_command, fixed wierd stuff in make_rle_sprites, and implemented hit_sprite for pixel-perfect collision detection (haven't tested it tho). This may possibly be the last release... due to frustration of programming the $@%* VESA VBE "standard(s)". I have the code to get the address of the linear frame buffer, which I may post separately if anyone is interested. In the meantime, progress needs to made on the Euphoria Linux/Unix port.
November 19, 1998 Sanity is restored. Changes to Neil.
November 13, 1998 I've posted an update of Neil on the downloads page. Try it out and let me know if it works or violently crashes on your pc. :-) I can't test 15 or 24 bit graphics modes on my hardware, so someone please tell me if they work. Neil does not work on Permedia 2 video cards for some reason (too bad, Monty). Impressive: here's a motion blur demo I cooked up.
November 10, 1998 Finally got Linear Frame buffers working correctly... DPMI calls are so much fun! :-P But now I notice that the run-length encoded sprites are positioned incorrectly in higher-than-8-bit modes... and now we're getting Causeways! Wheee! . . . Ah, that fixed it. Yay!
November 9, 1998 I've added Linear Frame Buffer support my in-house version of Neil... but its still buggy... I think the address is a half screen off because the upper part is all black. Weird, but I might hack something and post the code later today (like after I get some sleep).
October 18, 1998 Finally upgraded my pc: new motherboard and case with an AMD K6-2 300 chip, 128MB ram, Creative Labs Graphics Blaster Riva TNT pci video card... quite a leap from a 486, eh? I'll never have to write optimized code ever again! HAHAHAHA!!! Some things I hope to be working on: Neil graphics engine, a rewrite of Petephoria, and OpenGL wrappers for exw.
September 26, 1998 Well, I'm back at school and ready to learn again now that my brain has forgotten everything I learned last year. Also congrats go out to myself for being the 3000th visitor to my web page. No kidding. Thanks to everyone else for stopping by and keeping that counter going... wonder why it's not yellow anymore.
September 3, 1998 Neil.e updated on the downloads page. Since Neil is getting Mode_X support, there will probably not be any more work done on Mode_X 3. But not to worry, future versions of Neil will benefit from Mode_X's fast copy, clear copy, and mix copy commands. Virtual screens and sub-screens are shaping up too. These screens wll have panning capability (basically a way to move lots of sprites without having to mess with each individual sprite command. Used with sub-screens, it's great for parallax.) The question of how mixcopy will work in true-color has not been determined, though lightmaps and simple blending theoretically should work. The load_bitmap function is done, and converts between color depths smooth as silk. :-)
August 31, 1998 Updated--> news regarding the portable Euphoria interpreter. Version 0.10 is now available! (bugfixes and smaller exe files.)
August 29, 1998 Classic ListServ: soap channel, sprites, Crash course #1.... send me your faves and I'll list'em here. :-)