Hehe. I'm glad you like it, Zodiakos :) We really have felt like we were on the right track with V3, which is why we're sticking with it, despite the fact that it's like, work and stuff. :D
Regarding the sound system - actually, yeah, thats something I'm looking at right now. The verge.exe included in Timeless uses Mikmod, which does not support MP3s or anything like that. However, I've pretty much decided to switch to
FMOD which is a commercial sound system (which is free for non-commercial use). It really does pretty much everything you could ever want of a sound system - it plays all the standard module formats, MP3s (including supporting mp3s as sound effects), and OGGs, as well as MIDIs, supports module pattern timing and such, crossfading, etc. It also supports a lot of
rediculously unnecessary features like the ability to play freakin SHOUTCAST STREAMS, 3d sound positioning with doppler, occlusion and all kinds of crazy stuff.
Those advanced features will probably NOT be exposed to VC in the first versions. Eventually I would plan to adding interfaces for that, however, if there was any interest in it.
FMOD does have one drawback right now - something that I hope will be corrected in FMOD4 - which is that it fully and correctly plays official standards of XM and IT, but it does not right now support the unofficial additions that ModPlug Tracker made to those formats. When I first tried FMOD, it was with Timeless, and there is a lot of music by zaril in there - which all use modplug tracker. And I was really put off because this otherwise perfect sound system was screwing up on like 30% of the mods that I tried. But when I realized what the problem was, I tried it on more mods and those were the only 3 mods on my entire harddrive that didnt play correctly in FMOD. And since mods that dont play correctly could always be converted to MP3 and played with FMOD that way, I decided the advantages of FMOD outweighed that problem.
Regarding the 'cheating' function and its name - It has some quirks which is why it is named what it is and I was not intending to document it. The two main quirks are that the source image object MUST be 256x256 and that the resulting render is ALWAYS 320x200. Those restrictions are not consistent with the rest of the V3 api (nor does it correctly abide by clipping rectangles or SetLucent), which is why I did not intend it for general use. Due to the way the V3 graphics API is set up, however, it can be wrapped in such a way that you can do clipping and lucency with it.
I can fix the function up, however. The present version uses a precomputed table, so it is very fast, but thats the source of the resolution constraints. We did finally reverse engineer that table and can now run the effect at any resolution - much slower. It would be possible to set it up to generate tables on the fly, that will require some additional work tho.
V3 will be able to play any movie that runs through DirectShow.
