Crate Expectations

Scott Dalton of Legend, currently working on highly anticipated first person shooter "Unreal 2", updated his .plan yesterday to sing the praises of DirectX 8, and in particular the new "DirectCrate" component. According to the announcement, "DirectCrate is the component of the DirectX application programming interface (API) that allows you to directly manipulate storage containers, the hardware crate acceleration, and extended ExplodoCrate support". Given how common crates are in most first person shooters, this is obviously a god-send for lazy developers.

This miracle of programming "provides device-dependent access to cubic-crates, oblong-crates, barrels (horizontal or vertical), exploding crates, sludge barrels, and even cybercrates in a device-independent way". It also supports "advanced hardware implementations that provide hardware P&B (pushing and breaking), advanced fragment effects, multi-object dispense iteration, and recursive storage support (crates withing crates)".

You can remove your tongue from your cheek now.