The Fate of Tyrlon and other Dubious Things

Just a quick update on progress with the ever-present DeedCAD.   After discussing some of the minor bugs we wanted to fix while creating a demo for release on the website and CDs, we determined that our existing rendering system which uses GDI+ to draw the parcels just wasn’t going to cut it anymore.

Instead, we decided to scrap the entire rendering system and re-do it with DirectX 9.  The “engine” itself should be fairly simplistic since at this point we only want to be able to draw polygons and do basic rotation, zooming, and translation of parcels — these are all things that DirectX excels at.

Another feature that will get added as well in this release is the ability to add background pictures to a deed you are working on.  This can be especially useful if you are laying out a parcel that is in a city and you have a satellite photo of the location from a top-down view.  You can then overlay the parcel on the picture to see where it will fit with the surrounding area.  Eventually we want to add more features that let you lay out items on the design, kind a polygon drawing tool with some various pre-set shapes to represent different items.  The biggest complaint we’ve had from our (limited) customer base is that the drawing tools/screen are a bit basic which is one thing we hope to improve some with this release.

For a full revamp of the system we will probably need to wait until version 2.0 though as it will just be too much time and effort to do for a minor version release.

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