Yep, some of you have probably seen this coming, and we're making it official. While there may be some ongoing bugfix releases of WinV2, we've thrown all of our weight behind v3.

This is a little bit different than when we announced V2, and I want to make this clear. We have been working on v3 since before we even started working on Winv2, well before we actually released winv2. V3 is, right now, pretty close to completion. I would estimate the release is maybe 2-3 months off still, and this is of course a slightly optimistic estimate, because we want to put the polish into it's release that V2 never had. We originally wanted to wait until v3 was complete to announce it to avoid the whole hype/vaporware/blah issues, but we felt that letting the community know what was going on outweighed the surprise factor of waiting till it was complete.

I don't really want to get into a feature list of v3 right now. The main purpose of announcing v3 is simply to let people know why Winv2 releases have been spaced out and not a whole lot to them, and to allow us to discuss potential technologies we're considering on the boards and answer questions. I will continue to devote what energy towards winv2 is needed to allow the big V2 projects that are finishing up lately to be released, but all of the Big Features that Winv2 was going to get have gone into v3 instead.

The v3 dev team has basically been divided into myself (vecna) coding the engine, zeromus coding maped3, and Praetor coding vcc3. This has worked out extremely well so far and everyone that has seen v3 has been extremely pleased with how things are turning out. V3 is essentially, structurally, very similar to V2. It is not a huge change like V2 was from V1. It's more like V2 done right. It is completely hicolor, there is no 8bit/indexed color support. Maped3 is a windows native program (and really freakin' kickass), and vcc3 is an embeddable module that can be easily linked into maped, the engine, or any IDE type utility that someone might eventually wish to develop. Similar to maped2, maped3 will load V2 or v3 maps but only save v3 maps and vsps.

VCC3 is basically complete although stresstesting and new features/tweaks are an ongoing process. VC3 has several new language features: structs and multidimensional arrays are working right now, and there's more, but we don't want to play all our cards just yet. :)

Another issue that always plagued V2 was lack of decent documentation. For Verge3 we've developed a db/web driven VC documentation engine that, similar to other scripting systems out there such as php, allows users to post comments about specific functions to help others out with tips and pitfalls they've found. And to add to tatsumi's constant downward spiral of pain that is his sad excuse for a life, we made it his job to write the initial volley of VC docs. He's also working on some vc libraries to be available at launch.

In short, V3 is v2 with brand new, kickass, windows-friendly devtools, a completely re-engineered VC API that makes a lot more sense, is more uniform, has more cool stuff, and is (theoretically) completely resistant to VC user-error making verge crash horribly making us spend hours figuring out if it's a VERGE bug or a bug in the author's VC code. Oh, and V3 WILL have a pack-in game at launch. Probably more than one.

Well, that's it for now. We'll be happy to answer any questions on the discussion boards, so feel free to flame away. ;) Also be sure to check out vergesource for other v3 information and updates!