From your comments about progress in another thread Jim, I chose for reasons of continuity to ask here. Care to enlighten us on anything concerning MA 3 and recent accomplishments?

The problem, Jim, is how poorly the background scales to different resolutions on most video cards. I am not sure which Direct3D call you're using, but it is not perfect.

Morgan - Though I've heard of scaling problems on some cards, my cheapie Intel cards do a pretty nice job of blowing up the image to 1280 on this monitor and 1920 on my main system at home. Edgar is the guy for OS calls, so I don't know what he's using.

JAV - I have been amassing material for the background objects, and have started modeling them in Lightwave. The idea is that the center of the screen will look very similar to the current background, but with all the objects in real 3D. Then the camera can pan to the left and right, exposing the additional background in both directions. Having given up on Shaders (for the moment, anyway), I'm doing the modeling "Old School". This means that coral with thousands of moving "grass blades", like the large green object in the lower left, will have to be replaced by something with a harder surface. I'm currently searching for a coral type which looks similar to that one, so that the difference is not too obvious.

Has there been any word from Prolific on releasing either MA2.6 or the GA2? GA2 seems like it has been in beta for a few months and MA2.6 I thought was finished by Jim and was just waiting for Prolific to get ramped up to release it.

All true. Still waiting.

Will they release this new version also on dvd at stores when it comes out?

No.

I'm always surprised when someone e-mails me "I bought the Aquarium at the store because I wanted a physical CD."

Do they still make computers without CD burners?

I'll admit that the artwork on the boxes is outstanding. :)

There is a place for the physical CD, and that's when it's used as a gift. When I want to give it to someone, I go buy a copy at Fred Meyer. (No, I don't get free copies from the publisher.)

At least you can provide your friends with a copy signed by the artist... ;)

I think the staff over at Prolific is just palying with us, their sitting back infront of their huge 80" monitors and laughing "We gots new fishes and you don't - Ha Ha Ha!"
I can even see their beadie little faces stareing and laughing at me behind the screen while I sit patiantly on their web site for that version number to change...

Jim R. (Schnapps) says the release is very near now.

They don't have 80" monitors, unless something has changed since I visited them a couple years back.

..because everything else he/she wrote was spot on?

Jim R. (Schnapps) says the release is very near now.

This is true, I am working on it now actually. It is coming along well, but it takes time. With all the upgrade paths, special bundles & pricing, CD's etc... what used to be a simple upload an EXE and shoot off a couple of emails has become a little more complicated.

Regardless of all that, coming soon and the fans are the first to know.

Thanks for all of your hard work Schnapps. QA'ing software is no easy task, and is usually an underappreciated role.

Just an update for you all. We found a bug not related to Jim's work or us.

Basically on windows 98 and ME, running certain video cards and running the latest drivers causes the screensavers to lose textures. Older versions of the drivers work fine. This is actually a bug in the recent nvidia drivers running on older operating system, that we have to address. We have a work around for the issue and we are testing this fix now.