The version 0.99i of Post Apocalyptic Petra is now available. This versions adds several performance improvements, especially in the software rendering version - the DOS version is about +40% faster, making it playable even on a 200MHz CPU. Still not as fast as something like, say, Tomb Raider 1 (which probably wont ever happen because of the more generic 3D engine), but at least playable in retro PCs.

And on the topic of retro PCs, this version also adds support for DirectDraw and Direct3D 7, the latter making the game playable on original 3dfx voodoo cards.

Here is the full changelog:

• (Win) Added DirectDraw and Direct3D 7 backends (can now run natively in Voodoo 1!)
• (Win) Added wincfg.exe Windows-based configuration utility
• (Win) Fix crash at startup when the sound was disabled
• (DOS) Added readme.bat and readme view mode for the configuration utility
• (DOS) Added dirinfo file for Norton Commander
• (SDL) Fixed SDL 1.2 compilation, the game builds. No binaries though since sound is not implemented yet.
• (All) Optimized the software renderer and rewrote the inner loop in assembly
• (All) Added frustum culling for mesh scene nodes
• (All) Added a not-so-quick-yet-still-very-dirty PVS which is used for occlusion culling
• (All) Fixed grid geometry generator to not generate geometry for occluded faces - in addition to improving performance, this produces a cleaner output when the camera clip through the world geometry
• (All) Rendering optimizations give a ~+40% performance increase for the DOS version, making it playable on a 200MHz DOS PC (though still far from smooth)
• (All) Added descript.ion file for file managers that support it (e.g. Total Commander)