Well! It has been a terrific week. Dan and I took some time off from our regular job and got to work on Delvers quite a bit. I got the new map routines working pretty well - and they look really, really cool! I'm very pleased. It all matches Andy's art work just right and gives it a wonderful feel of exploration and (wait for it....) delving. Yes, the change is all good.

To further prove the point, Dan previously ran the old engine on his kinda crappy laptop and was getting 18 FPS. Not deadly slow, but not great. With the new engine it's running at 60 FPS. That just knocks his socks off. Of course on my spiffy laptop with a 64 MB graphics cards, I run easily at 85-90 FPS and even top over 100 FPS when I shut everything else down but the game. This all adds up to me being very pleased with our difficult decision. It does seem to be paying off in spades. We're gaining a lower profile of hardware that will handle our game and that should turn into more people able to play.

Another thing: it is really easy to develop levels now. Much, much easier than before. Just open up a text editor and edit your map. Use little ASCII symbols for altars, teleporters, stairs, types of tiles, doors, and the like. Very fun and very fast! And the download size is about half what it was. What else? Man,I just like the feel of it. That's probably the biggest improvement. It feels exciting and has tension already - just like I was hoping it would.