Work work...

If you got that Warcraft III reference, you get a cookie ;)

Anyway, time for a quick update on Tactics' development:

• Added tile heights into the game
• Added Z buffer (occlusion is now in effect)
• Added character sprites changing their facing direction when rotating

Not much in terms on number of bullet points! However, it took an excruciating long time since I am relatively new to the DirectX API. Adding the Z buffer took me hours of research to find out that the background was occluding the 3D terrain (I was drawing from the back to front with D3DXSprite & 2D transformation so Z values were insignificant prior to trying to add the Z buffer). As you can see, I am quite the DX noob :P

Another tidbit of info is that I'm currently developing the game on a laptop with a Geforce2 Go. It has a whopping 16MB video ram and ~500 million pixels/second. For comparison, my desktop computer's Radeon X850XT has a 8 billion pixels/second, and the X850XT is hardly top of the line. Fill rate was used as a quick comparison and is not intended to be a true-to-life comparison of the performance difference. I have also tested the game on a P4 with an Intel Integrated Graphics 82910 chipset and it maintained a steady 70fps (vsynced).

While high fps, or at least steady fps, should be expected of a graphically non-intensive game like Tactics, it is still relieving to know that the game runs at a stable 60 fps on a Geforce2 Go. However, I suspect there is a lot of room for optimization, as there is a noticeable drop in FPS when the character stats are drawn. As I said earlier, I'm really new at this and have been reading articles all over the internet about DX (Gamedev.net for the win), so it will probably be a while before I will iron out all the slowdowns due to inefficient code.

Alright, well that's it for now. I have attached a few screenshots to show the developmental progress more clearly.

Edit: Removed screenshots and uploaded a new video for clarity: