A question and thought for pete...

Greetings,

Just wanted to ask a quick question. I was wondering if it would be possible, in some future version of your soft plug-in, to include the 'easter-egg' blurring effect available in your hardware plug-ins. My (highly limited) understanding is that with this enabled, first the software draws all polys (ie FVP), passes it to the 3D card buffer, then back to the RAM for a blur/anti-aliase pass, then back to the 3D card for display. Obviously, this takes up quite a few cycles, but I aint *****in, it works very nice. It just seems to me that it ought to be possible (and faster?) to alias the image before it ever hits the GFX cards buffer. Just a thought.

Anyways, can you maybe think about including some kind of blurring/anti-aliasing effect in your soft plug in the future? I was thinking that maybe just the blurring effect itself could be hardware accelerated. Or, I was thinking, maybe you could render the entire screen via software, take each frame and turn it into a large 32-bit bitmap texture and then (using hardware) place it on a single flat polygon to be displayed on screen. I was also positively thinking I dont know the first thing about DirectX or plug-ins or anything else, so feel free to put me in my place.

Lastly, I would like to add the usual thanks and gratitude for your plug-ins. They are, simply put, IMO, the best around. Im glad you took this up as a hobby...though I look foward one day to seeing your name on a commercial product (maybe that house control thingy?).

Sincerely,
TastEPlasma

1Ghz Athlon-C, ABITKT7A-RAID MoBo, 512MB PC150 RAM, AiW Radeon, Hercules GameTheaterXP, IBM 307030 HD, 4-pt. Surround Sound w/Sub, 19" flatscreen monitor, Gravis GamePad Pro USB X2