There were lots of important bugfixes and small improvements. We are also glad that three additional platforms are now officially supported: Nintendo DS, GP2X and GP32. You can already download official DS and GP2X binaries, and the GP32 port will be available soon.

Some of the most significant bugfixes are:

Many fixes for Humongous Entertainment games and better support for international versions of the games
Improved detection of the FM-TOWNS version of Indy3
Several fixes for The Feeble Files and more non-English versions are supported now
Some parts of the Kyrandia engine were rewritten so the game needs less CPU power now, and thus works better on lower-end devices
The PSP, PS2 and WinCE ports were greatly improved
The PalmOS port is again up-to-date and features separate build for Tapwave Zodiac
The WinCE port supports 2002 devices again

There were lots of important bugfixes and small improvements. We are also glad that three additional platforms are now officially supported: Nintendo DS, GP2X and GP32. You can already download official DS and GP2X binaries, and the GP32 port will be available soon.

Some of the most significant bugfixes are:

Many fixes for Humongous Entertainment games and better support for international versions of the games
Improved detection of the FM-TOWNS version of Indy3
Several fixes for The Feeble Files and more non-English versions are supported now
Some parts of the Kyrandia engine were rewritten so the game needs less CPU power now, and thus works better on lower-end devices
The PSP, PS2 and WinCE ports were greatly improved
The PalmOS port is again up-to-date and features separate build for Tapwave Zodiac
The WinCE port supports 2002 devices again

There were lots of important bugfixes and small improvements. We are also glad that three additional platforms are now officially supported: Nintendo DS, GP2X and GP32. You can already download official DS and GP2X binaries, and the GP32 port will be available soon.

Some of the most significant bugfixes are:

Many fixes for Humongous Entertainment games and better support for international versions of the games
Improved detection of the FM-TOWNS version of Indy3
Several fixes for The Feeble Files and more non-English versions are supported now
Some parts of the Kyrandia engine were rewritten so the game needs less CPU power now, and thus works better on lower-end devices
The PSP, PS2 and WinCE ports were greatly improved
The PalmOS port is again up-to-date and features separate build for Tapwave Zodiac
The WinCE port supports 2002 devices again

We wrote status reports during the development of almost all the other versions of Payback but we haven't so far for the GP2X. To address this glaring omission, We've put together this report to give you an insight into what's new in the GP2X version of the game - and there's a lot!

New And Improved
The GP2X version of the game is based on the GBA code as this is the most bug free and up-to-date - and is also helpfully already very optimised for the ARM processor. Of course, the GP2X's extra CPU power allowed the game to be improved dramatically. The main new features in the GP2X version are:

Completely reworked front end and HUD.
HDR rendering and tone mapping, including extremely high quality precalculated lighting.
Almost all dialogue is now recorded speech.
A new "Challenge" game mode.
Lots of new songs on the soundtrack.
New vehicle models.
Higher resolution and framerate.
Lots of bug fixes and gameplay tweaks.
Lighting
By far the biggest change here was the switch to a vastly more sophisticated lighting algorithm. Each surface is assigned a unique HDR floating point lightmap (this means there are around 40,000 unique lightmaps per city), creating almost 1GB of lighting data per city. These lightmaps are calculated using a very high quality radiosity algorithm. This involves simulating the path of 77 billion photons per city (almost a trillion for all 11 cities). Despite the code being very optimised, this process still takes over 10 hours per city on a 2.4GHz PC. This tool also allows you to view the city from any angle using the new lighting data, as shown in the grabs below:

All this data is then reduced to around 2MB so it can easily be loaded into memory by the GP2X. This 500:1 compression ratio is achieved using a JPEG-style Discrete Cosine Transform and removing duplicate lightmaps or those that can never be seen from an overhead viewpoint. As you move around the city on the GP2X, these lightmaps are decompressed and combined with the real-time lighting (which is done using gouraud shading). Once this final lightmap has been calculated, it is then combined with the texture maps and rendered to the screen. (The combined textures are cached so none of this significantly effects performance.)

Laurent Fischer interview

- He doesn't expect all of society to immediately jump on board from day 1. At first it will probably be mainly the hardcore and casual gamers buying it, but little by little he expects more people to come on board through word of mouth, advertising etc... much like the DS. He says word of mouth has played a huge part in the DS's success in Europe.

- He says in Europe the DS has done a wonderful job of capturing the female gamer and the casual gamer, but getting the non-gamers still has some way to go yet. NOE's goal is to get the DS selling as fast as it is in Japan where on a weekly basis they're still not able to fulfil the demand, becaue they're attracting such a broad audience. "In Europe I don't expect us to be in that position for some time, but we're on the way. It will take one year, certainly and with the Wii it will take the same time. We know it's a long way to get out of the videogaming ghetto"

- He says when creating games Nintendo doesn't say "this is going to be a gamer's game and this is not." He says a lot of hardcore gamers enjoy Brain Training, because it's something different and another good example is Animal Crossing. Nobody at Nintendo thought Animal Crossing would be a very massmarket game. It started out as a hardcore game with people around the world going crazy for it, then it became a bridge between the hardcore, casuals and the wider population, which included females and people looking for a different concept. In Japan they were surprised by the strength of Animal Crossing's sales and every week NOE says "WOW" at the sales. He said on the GameCube it only sold 150,000 in Europe but the DS game has already passed 850,000

- He says for months and months he had to sit and see journalists politely smiling when he told them DS is stronger than the PSP, but he knew from the start it would take off eventually, because he tested it on the people around him. He said his wife kept stealing his DS which has never happened with their other consoles and his neighbour - an awful old lady - became addicted to Zoo Keeper. She'd played Tetris long ago and now she was hoooked on Zoo Keeper. "If there was one person who wouldn't play a videogame, it was her"

- He says he's not worried that people can download the old (Virtual Console) games on the PC. He says it's important to be able to play them on your TV screen and doesn't think playing a NES game on the PC is something you'll really love. "Of course, you can play them on your PSP via emulation too! [laughs] Actually most PSP owners I know are using them for Nes and SNES games"

This is my first DS game so I hope you all like it. It's a 2 player deathmatch game where you both play on the same DS. The object is obviously to kill your friend, which you can do by knocking them off the bottom of the screen or using one of the 18 weapons that are randomly populated into the level, which also happens to be randomly generated.

All the action takes place on the top screen, whilst the bottom shows the scores and that type of thing. It's been intentionally designed to be very retro and so there's no real use of the DS's more unique features.

Still in beta stages, and a little unstable (especially on emulators). If you get a lot of crashes there's a debug version so you can let me know what class & function it's dieing in. Planning to add wifi multiplayer, statistics saving, stylus menu controls and of course stability and bugfixes somewhere down the track. *Glances at top of screen* - maybe I'll enter it in this cool dev compo when it gets better as well