As a lot of you probably already know, Smoke is a tech demo that showcases a framework to support n-way threading of game technologies. By properly threading a game it can have more accurate physics, smarter AI, more particles, and/or a faster frame-rate. Smoke demonstrates one way to achieve better games.

This week the smoke team released version 1.2 of the Smoke Tech demo.   What's new with this release?

• a simpler build and compatibility with Visual Studio 2008 SP1

• Fixed occasional crash when subdividing objects, after physics collision

• Fixed a number of memory leaks and uses of uninitialized memory

• Ambient lighting now lights the shaded side of objects

• Smoke runs faster, mostly due to speedups in fire object code

You can read about it and download the new version here