How Much Can I Chew?

Austin posted another State-of-the-Union yesterday, and he was good about only mentioning things that are fairly close to completion (e.g. the panel texture optimizations) as well as things that are general (e.g. threading optimizations). After a long beta, when 9.0 went final I sort of went crazy and started a whole series of new projects at the same time; here are some things that I have in progress:

• Major rewrites to the texture management code for both better orthophoto handling and better threaded performance.
• Moving the sim to unicode and true-type fonts, with a new system for translating the application's strings. (I'll post more on this soon - thanks to those who have already volunteered to work on translations!)
• Working on new shader technology to take better advantage of DirectX-10-class hardware.
• A big pile of airplane features to complement what was added to 9.0.

That's a bit much for the next patch, so it's likely that only some of these things will actually make it into the next patch, and I'm not sure what you'll see. A lot of sim work goes in as a series of small independent pieces; only the last parts of a feature are user-visible.

For example, the first part of texture work was simply rearranging how the code was structured to make new things possible. Change to the user experience: none. The second part changed threaded handling of textures, which at least shows up as performance improvements. But both the stage for new features later.

So even if a lot of the above doesn't make it into the next major patch, a lot of ground work is going in, setting us up for features later.