ABOUT OUR WORLD
ABOUT OUR WORLD
February 23, 1996
Have you ever talked to people in AlphaWorld about what colors they see on
certain objects? With the current software, there is a problem with some
"16-bit" displays (they are actually more like 15-bit) which causes the
Renderware engine (upon which the current
AlphaWorld client software is built) to act more like an 8-bit display. This
has a strange effect on the palette, and certain objects display incorrectly.
For instance, here are two photos of STREET1.RWX. The one on the left is
the way it was designed, the one on the right is how it looks to many of us,
epecially the ones using Windows 95 for some reason.
Besides minor differences in the camera angle that make the sizes look
different, you can see a big difference in appearance! Here's another
comparison, this time with ZVCTR01.RWX, a "Z" object used in Vicktoria City
(see Under Construction in this issue). Here the difference
is even more marked.
In each case, both shots were taken in "16-it" mode under Windows 95
and then dithered to 256 colors to save transmission time for you...they look
essentially the same here as they did in 16-bit mode.
The difference here is Renderware version 2.0. All of these shots were taken
from an AlphaWorld-like object viewer/maker program I am writing, but the
better looking ones are from a version built for Renderware 2.
Even as you read this, the AlphaWorld programmers are working hard to move
the client software to Renderware 2.0, but there is a catch: 2.0 doesn't
come in a 16-bit version. That means that the target platform has now become
Windows 95 (and hopefully Windows 3.1 running WIN32S, the 32-bit thing that
you probably already have installed if you use Windows 3.1.) There are other
advantages to moving to Renderware 2 as well, for instance the Renderware 1.4
DLL is not "shareable," that is you can't run multiple applications that
require it at the same time. So you can't run AlphaWorld and RWVIEW
(a demo program to view Renderware objects) because they both
require RWL.DLL for exclusive use. Also, with Renderware 2.0, installing WING
won't be necessary.
Some of you may have noticed that AlphaWorld may not run properly on eight-
megabyte machines anymore. This is partially because of the richness of the
AlphaWorld experience, which is enhanced by the number of bitmap textures
used in the objects we build with. Or it could be because you have other
applications running that require a lot of memory...for instance, Netscape 2
is a real memory grabber.
Moving to Renderware 2.0 may actually save some memory, so your eight-megabyte
machine may work for a while longer...but performance increases are needed
in the client, and most likely this will require writing specifically for
machines with more than eight megabytes of RAM. But this is your notice:
think about getting at least eight more megabytes if you want to run leading-
edge software! Most new applications that have the special features we all
want are being written for machines running 32-bit Windows, and with at least
16 megabytes of RAM. If you want Netscape to run Java scripts (highly
recommended,) or if you want to run other high-performance software such as
the AlphaWorld of the future, the ante is going up. Unfortunately, RAM prices
are dropping much more slowly than other prices in PC hardware. But in my
opinion, the cost of an extra eight megabytes is entirely justified considering
the payback.
Where is AlphaWorld Heading?
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