The Windows version of the new VectorStorm multithreading code is now in place and working, and in the live trunk.  (Has been for about week, now;  I apparently forgot to post about it!)

I’ve also been playing a bit with gDEBugger, an OpenGL profiler/analyser/etc, which is now free (was previously quite expensive to license).  It’s nowhere near PIX in terms of power and insight, but it’s as close as we have under OpenGL at the moment.  And you can’t argue with the price.  And it works on all the major platforms, which is pretty awesome to see.  I’ve already made some sizeable rendering speed boosts for VectorStorm just on the basis of its insights into MMORPG Tycoon 2, and will have more in the near future.  Once I have these mostly sorted out, I’ll port them back into trunk as well.

This tool has also pointed out that lots of the techniques VectorStorm’s core rendering architecture use have been declared obsolete as of OpenGL 3.1.  Which surprised me, since I kind of designed VectorStorm for OpenGL 1.4 (which was the most that my ancient laptop could handle at the time);  I really didn’t think that the interfaces I was using would last all the way up to 3.1!  But it does suggest that someday I should be thinking about looking forward to the more modern revisions of OpenGL;  purging some of my old rendering architecture, and replacing it with more modern approaches.  That won’t be until after MT2, though, unless MT2 really calls for some modern rendering techniques.  (I’d really like to have some basic shadows.  But otherwise, I’m not too fussed over fancy rendering techniques for MT2).