My sound manager now plays some funky music. I had it doing that already, but I spent 15 minutes getting it to play an intro section and then a looping section. That'll be far better for maps, since you can have a short bit as an intro, followed by a longer looping section (if you want, that is).
I "borrowed" the music from the ATI Subsurface Scattering demo. In fact, that's what gave me the idea.
I also had a look around the ATI demos and tech papers to see what my sexy new video card can do, and it's pretty damn impressive. Although I feel that ATI could do more with the demos they have there. Also, the gargoyle clock exits immediately with the D3D debug runtime, and half the textures are missing in the "Ruby: The DoubleCross" demo if you use the debug runtime. How strange. Oh well.
I haven't done an awful lot to the MMORPG recently. Actually, I haven't done anything. So I'll be doing that tomorrow. I need to update the map editor to allow you to place portals, and then I'll modify my game's map class to load the map from an ini file. That'll allow you to specify some config options, such as the music to be played (if any), the background type to use (I'll be more-or-less ripping off Maple's background idea), and any other information such as NPCs in the map. Although NPCs will probably be in another file, in a scripting language (DruinkScript probably).
One of the ATI papers I was reading was This One. The title "Making Pretty Pictures with D3D" interested me, so did the 2.5D stuff mentioned near the start, since that's exactly what I want to be doing. Starting from slide 5, it mentions Depth Of Field effects, which are cheap to do. I've heard that mentioned a couple of times, but I wasn't exactly sure about what it meant. So I have a better understanding now, and I'll be looking into it in more depth soon.
Anyway, that would probably be great for backgrounds in my game. DOF would suit it very well.
EDIT: Oh yeah, I forgot that I have a couple of little nitpicky problems with XP/ATI.
Firstly, I have a dual monitor setup going now, with both monitors going at 1280x1024. When I exit a fullscreen application that was running at anything other than 1280x1024, the second monitor ends up changing to 640x400, which screws up all my windows on it. And the fullscreen application runs on the first monitor...
Secondly, XP seems to keep forgetting my window Z order, seemingly randomly. I end up dragging around windows behind other windows, which is bloody annoying, because the only way I can find to correct the Z order is to close and reopen them...
Anyway, I'm going to go and play Guild Wars for a bit.
