PREVIEW: TPG Hotfix #9I would like to announce that in the very near future, I plan to update the True Patch with Hotfix #9, which will add forced anti-aliasing function to the game. At present, the VTMB engine does not contain any sort of anti-aliasing settings... they need to be forced via the video card's control panel, prior to starting the game. Which is a less than ideal situation, due to the fact that different games benefit from different anti-aliasing settings and hence, it is always best to setup your video card to do AA on an application-controlled basis.
My next Hotfix (#9) will give the end-user the ability to permanently add native anti-aliasing capability to the Bloodlines engine, eliminating the need to make any changes within your video control panel.
This upcoming Hotfix will simply be a graphical improvement for Bloodlines, further bringing the game engine into line with modern video hardware.
What it is: This will be an update to the DirectX code for VTMB, which will force the game to run in splendid DirectX 9 "4X" anti-aliasing mode... regardless of your video card's control panel settings. This AA functionality is included within pretty much every newer game on the market -- but the necessary code to enable it was not present in VTMB, due to the game being developed for the now-defunct DirectX 8.
Hence VTMB has no internal AA settings of its own... and if you wanted to play VTMB with AA enabled, you needed to force it -- by changing the settings in your video card's control panel. But forced AA is actually more of a drain on your video card than having the AA code native to the game itself. This is why I have decided to go ahead with this next Hotfix. It will provide superior video rendering in VTMB, without the need to force it via the video card's control panel. You can then leave your video card set to "Application Controlled" for its AA setting, which is in fact the optimal way to set your video card.
What it does: Instead of giving you a long-winded description, let's just look at a side-by-side comparison. In the screenshot below, I have resized everything up in scale a bit, to make the aliasing around the edges of the model more apparent. My video card is set to "Application Controlled" for AA -- meaning that for VTMB, it would normally be turned off completely.
Let's take a look...Look carefully at the area inside the red boxes. On the left is the default VTMB engine, with no modifications of any kind. As you can see quite clearly in that screenshot, the edges of the model show very noticeable aliasing. It's pretty ugly, frankly. But now take a look at the screenshot on the right. It's practically a night-and-day difference. With the new code added by the upcoming Hotfix #9, superb anti-aliasing has been added straight into the game engine itself. And the results are excellent... there is hardly any visible aliasing at all along the edges of the model.
For the record, both screenshots were taken at a screen resolution of 1920x1080 HD widescreen, with anti-aliasing set to "Application Controlled" in my video card's control panel. Hotfix #9, once installed, will essentially force VTMB to run in anti-aliased mode at all times... significantly improving its overall appearance, without chewing up too much resources. It will actually use less resources than if you were forcing AA via your video card's control panel, simply because it will be running as native code, without the need for any "outside intervention" from your video card.
This next Hotfix will be released in the very near future... possibly within a week from this announcement. I just want to do a bit more fine-tuning and testing on it, before I make it available. So far, it looks fantastic.