Esoteric Update #186 - Hardware Acceleration

A late update this time. To be blunt, yesterday was too hot and wet for me to get anything done. In any case, it's morning now, and I feel better, so let's get this rolling. First, the lore:

Lore: Human Ontopotence

Also, have an article:

Mechanics: Artificial Agents – Addendum

And now for the update. So what did we get done? Well, apart from putting a few thousand more words of writing into the game, which isn't that exciting yet, at least not until we can start using this content. This mainly went into the tool system as well as the emotion system.

What I consider the more important bit of work here are the changes to the installer. And to explain what's up, I need to go back a bit and bring up some changes to the game configuration I started experimenting with a while back.

To put it simply, you might say we were using software rendering up to this point. Everything was done on the CPU, though it didn't have to. As it turned out, there was a hardware-accelerated rendering option available. It's just that turning it on wasn't clearly mentioned or explained in the documentation. After turning it on, I wanted to make sure it's stable, so I ran it on my development instance of the game and... well, it does work, actually. At the very least on a fully updated modern system. I'm not convinced it will work as well on a Windows 7 PC, for example. Ultimately it led me to decide that the installer can optionally enable acceleration. You don't have to, but you can.

Also, as it might be evident from the abovementioned article, I've been poking about some AI issues. Essentially just trying to get the NPCs into a state where they behave somewhat more naturally.

I'm going to have a few free days soon due to the holidays (hey, at least I don't need to go to physiotherapy and the doctor), so I'll try to get a bit more done.