CompuServe Messages

Arthur: Actually, the viability of a product on the Amiga has a lot to do with the program, programmers and just how much work is involved in putting it together. VistaPro for the Amiga has at least 4 man-years of work in it, between John, Brick and myself, and given the size of the market and the price point, it's really hard to keep it profitable. At this point, I don't know how much original work I will do on it, but I will continue to port the additions and changes that John does to the PC version. (This allows leveraging the programming changes for the Amiga off of the size of the PC marketplace.) We've had some success in experimenting with mirrored water, including adding a little "texture" into the water, so it's not quite a perfect reflection, more like it occurs in nature. Adding raytracing would require rewriting the entire rendering engine and would greatly slow down the rendering time. Also, as trees are created at render time, and are not "objects", they wouldn't be visible in a raytraced reflection. I expect to add anti-aliasing in 4.0 as an option. It will require rendering to a much larger screen than the final image size, so it will be pretty memory sensitive. Clint <VRLI>