The last preview

What changed?

A lot and not a lot at the same time. This last stretch focuses a lot on all the small things: Small hickups, misaligned things and the like, tuning stages and enemies. Way too many way too small things to list them here.

However, one big thing this version brings is music! While music playback has been integrated in NRender for a long time, I haven’t exercised that code for a while now. So there were, of course, bugs to fix. I also took this opportunity to integrate building music files properly into my new build system.

An unfortunate realization

If you think back to my earliest post, you might remember my original hardware target for PC: A 486 DX2 running at 66 Mhz.

I’ve done my best, but the game won’t quite run acceptably there. You really need a 486DX4 at 100 Mhz to get reasonable frame rates throughout the game. I’ve already updated the system requirements accordingly.

Depending on your system, you might even need a faster system. For PCs, the fastest version will be the DOS one running on actual DOS. Maybe followed by the OpenGL variant for Windows running on at least Windows 95 with a proper 3D accelerator. It will be interesting to run benchmarks across platforms using the final build…

You can, of course, still run the game on an 486DX2@66! Framerates might get a bit too choppy from time to time, though. Still, I’m very pleased to have made a proper, no fooling 3D game running on an 486!

What’s next?

If all goes well, next will be the final release! I will finish the boss enemy and focus on testing and fixing things after that.