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Rebalancing things is outside the scope of my initial efforts, but getting the Flash Cannon working reasonably well in single player would be a good starting point for a later followup.

Also, quoting a forum post is not a link.   

I may end up keeping the software renderer intact for the first implementation, since replacing Execute Buffer instructions with the equivalent D3D9 operations wasn't particularly hard.  It's interesting how much simpler D3D9 makes setting things up. 

I'll plead ignorance to all this...   

I guess "major" is relative. 

The fundamental problem with the Flash Cannon is that I didn't take network play into consideration when implementing it.  It casts a beam every frame, flooding the network layer with so many ordnance creation events that most of them get dropped, crippling the weapon on the remote side.  Fixing it would take some major engineering.

Ooh, that's a good point.  Intel IGPs are the bane of game developers everywhere...

(Of course, it's not like I'd be having D3D do much heavy lifting.)

Anything Windows has a codec for should work.

Regardless of the merits or flaws of Gamespy, it'd be a lot of work since I've never worked with a networking SDK like that before.  I also don't know if BZ1 would qualify for an Indie license since it was a commercially-released game at one point.  It's interesting speculation but it'd be a long shot at best.  (RakNet would have similar issues there as well.)

"Run away!  Run awaaaaaayy!" 

Making the Flash Cannon less useless might be okay, but extensive, game-changing re-balance would need to wait for a subsequent update.

On the other hand, it's all just ODF files.  If people are willing to come up with values that the community can agree on, I could include it in the package.  Getting the community to agree is the hard part. 

Drama is one of the constants of the universe.   

Also...
Gozer: "ARE YOU A GOD?"
Ray: "No"
Gozer: "THEN DIE!" <zzzt!>
Winston: "Ray, when someone asks you if you're a god, you say YES!"

I'll keep the original renderer in a separate branch just in case.

Unlike previous versions, Windows 7 doesn't come with the Intel Indeo codec that most of the shell AVIs use.  I just decompressed the videos in VirtualDub on my Windows XP laptop before upgrading to 7.  The main downside is the files are now huge. 

KILL IT WITH FIRE

The two big differences with my custom build are Visual C++ 2008 Express and the August 2009 DirectX SDK.  The latter might have a lot to do with it, but it's hard to tell.  I'd have to dig up and install an older version of the SDK to know for sure.