Here I'll put up any news and notes about the current state of the programming.

06/08/01:
I had hoped to get more done, but I've been busy with other work. Not much has changed, but the sprites for the player and crosshairs are now loaded from another bmp. Go ahead and change 'em if you want.
Also replaced the jumping with a jetpack. No cool smoke trail or anything yet. Be patient, and things will come.  =)

03/08/01:
I'm halfway done with the new graphics system. The terrain can be any size, and you can move around the whole map. It's not slow, as long as there is enough video memory to hold all the surfaces.
Once I get some other things done I'll put up a new engine demo.

29/07/01:
Apparently, some video cards won't allow surfaces in video memory that are wider than the screen. Two surfaces were causing problems - the sprites surface (which was 800x600 for no reason) and the terrain. The first surface was easily changed to 640x480, but the second required making the terrain smaller.

So the demo has been updated, which should work on more computers now. However, terrain can only be 640 pixels wide. I'm not sure about the height, though.

I am redoing the graphics part. The next update will take longer, but hopefully have much more done.

27/07/01:
The startup logging wasn't done right, and would often produce an empty or half-written file. Redid it so it should work this time.
Still need to add logging in the main game loop though.

When particles destroy terrain, only that part on the surface is updated. In other words, you can now see the effect on terrain immediately, and not using the slow method.
On the other hand, creating/removing terrain with the mouse still uses the slow method. 

25/07/01:
I reorganized the source files for the DLL, so it'd be easier to add things.

---------Configuration: Game - Win32 Release---------
Game.dll - 0 error(s), 0 warning(s)

Yeah, right.

Also added logging every step of the startup, to try and figure out what's wrong with it.