After having my hard drive die and repiecing VP togheter, I am getting ready to release an update which includes the feature I wrote for Ultracade; render-caching. This features makes it so you only have to go through the rendering process of a table once, and as long as you don't change the table or the window size you play at, it will just load all the pre-rendered images from the cache. This will make it much much faster for those people who just want to click&play their favorite table.
Additionally, I have improved the 'play only' scenario (/play -tablename) so that when you double-click a table file, the editor does not display at all, and when you exit the player, it exits to windows, not the editor. One question: For those people who write front-ends to VP, is there any desired behavior from this mode than to just be able to pass a close-window message to the VP player and have the process exit?
A few more things:
1) VP is now compiled with a much newer compiler. This wouldn't seem like a big deal but I noticed that some of the floating-point stuff worked differently, and I had to do some fixes. So once I release a beta update, be on the lookout for the ball doing totally bizarre things.
2) I understand Ultracade has some physics updates; I lost my synchronized version of these when my HD died; I'll have to piece that together later.
3) The render-caching only works for tables saved to disk; not dirty in the editor. This shouldn't be much of a problem since caching won't do you much good while you're editing a table anyway. If you're doing a lot of editing, you will want to turn off render-caching under Preferences/Video Options since doing the caching takes a little bit of time that won't be benefiting you at all.
- Randy
