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Just thought I'd take a minute and bring the regular Forum up to speed on what's been happening with MA3.
The Alpha testers have been busy finding bugs, and I've been busy fixing them. One problem that came up early-on was the fact that MA3 did not seem to run on nVidia MX440 cards (or perhaps any GeForce 4 card). This was a controversial card, mainly because it claimed to be compatible with DirectX 8.1, but actually isn't. It doesn't do Vertex Shaders. MA3 uses Vertex Shaders for the lightplay, the fish movements, and some other things.
It turns out that these cards were used in a lot of OEM machines, so I thought I'd better support them if at all possible. So I bought a used one on Ebay. When it arrived, I found that it's an AGP card, and I didn't have any AGP machines. So I bought a used AGP motherboard on Ebay. When it arrived, I found that it used a different type of socket from my spare CPU. So I bought a used CPU on Ebay. When it arrived, I found that it needed a different type of fan, and so on and so on...until last Friday, when I finally had enough compatible bone-yard parts to build what I call my Frankentein Machine. Astoundingly, it all worked on the first try.
Now I can compile and test the MA3 program on that machine, and it has lead to a lot of good troubleshooting which will benefit nearly everyone.
As far as getting the program to work on the MX440 card, it is working but with some visual anomolies which still need fixing. In spite of the fact that it has to do Vertex Shaders in software emulation, and only has 64 megs of Video Ram, the card still runs MA3 at a respectable 40+ frames per second.
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