We are still unsure of the final outcome of all of this, but all questions be able to be answered monday night / tuesday morning, which is when the sr staff will have a chance to meet.

Our staff can be found in irc.dynamix.com:6667 #twl stop on by and say hello :)

Matches should be canceled until further notice. If we do recover fully, we will work out scheduling issues as they arise.

Microsoft has released the beta of its first major revision of DirectX since DirectX 8 was released in late 2000. Like DX8, which introduced support for the programmable shader effects that were a major feature of Nvidia's GeForce3 and ATI's Radeon 8500 graphics cards, DirectX 9 is expected to open the door to features in next-generation graphics hardware due out later this year. We've already heard in early reports on 3Dlab's P10 and Matrox's Parhelia-512 chips that the big push is toward more programmability and away from fixed-function effects.

One of the key features Microsoft has announced for DirectX 9 is a high-level programming language for graphics effects that should make it much easier for game developers to program and debug new effects. While the shader language in DirectX 8 was based on assembly, which requires explicit instructions for the most mundane tasks, the high-level shader language in DX9 is based on C and will work with Microsoft's Visual Studio programming tools. While this feature won't be used directly by gamers, it should address the common complaint that there aren't enough games that really use the vertex and pixel shader features in current high-end graphics cards.

DirectX 9 includes many other features as well. Some, like displacement map support and tessellation of surfaces, were announced with the upcoming 3Dlabs and Matrox chips. Others, such as version 2.0 specs for vertex and pixel shaders and real-time animation blending, haven't yet been revealed in detail. There are also additions outside of Direct3D, the part of DirectX that many games use for 3D graphics support. Most notably, DirectMusic has seen some improvements for low-latency playback, there's more support for hardware video acceleration, and DirectPlay networking has been enhanced and ported to work on PocketPC 2002 handhelds. The most wide-ranging changes to Direct X traditionally happen with the even-numbered versions, so it's somewhat surprising to see even this many enhancements in DirectX 9.