It’s that time again.  A new version of Gorgon has been released into an unsuspecting populace to help spread terrorism and christianity at the same time.

There are multiple bug fixes, and these are detailed here.  The most fun thing is that I’ve included a new example that demonstrates how to make per-pixel lit (and bump mapped) sprites via normal maps.  It’s pretty spiffy if I do say so myself.

Other than that, the biggest change is the upgrade to the November version of SlimDX.  With this version the requirement for the Visual C++ 2008 SP1 runtimes has been dropped (about goddamn time too) and the SlimDX guys have created awesome installers for SlimDX.  The big deal about dropping the runtimes is that Gorgon no longer requires the runtimes to be distributed with its own installer and this has decreased the size of the installer (a little).  But the biggest deal comes from the SlimDX runtime installer and x64.  This installer will put SlimDX (both x64 and x86 versions if you’re on an x64 version of Windows) into the GAC.  This means that if you’re running with a project configured for AnyCPU (Project Properties->Build Tab), and you’re running on an x86 OS, it’ll use the x86 version of SlimDX automatically, and if you’re on an x64 version of Windows it’ll use the x64 version automatically.  This means there’s no longer a need to maintain two project/solution files for x86 and x64.  This is a great relief to me as it was a pain in the ass to keep updated.  Of course, this only works if both platform versions of SlimDX are installed into the GAC (e.g. if you only have the x86 version of SlimDX installed and the program is forced to compile to x64 – it’ll fail). 

Wait… what’s that?  You -want- an x64 (or x86) only version of your program?  Well, just set it to compile for x64 (or x86) instead of AnyCPU and the runtime will automatically use the x64 (or x86) version of SlimDX.  Fantastic!

So what are you waiting for?  Happiness is only a download away.