Brad, suits are not proper attire for the office.

First off, congratulations to Brad for being selected one of Crane's 40 under 40. I'm sure it's a great honor in the business world. It doesn't hold any weight here though

Today, I started out by showing Brad (suit boy) what we accomplished last night with the lighting. Then we all talked about how good Homeworld2 looks. But, we won't be doing that anytime soon as our current project is really just a board game. That's fine. Actually, that's the way I prefer it. But it doesn't mean that we can't do all the cool effects that you find in Homeworld2. There's a lot more DX9 learning I'll have to do before I get there.

Oh, another congratulations to my buddy Natasha Tatarchuk. You didn't know it, but Natasha works at ATI and is currently on the GDC circuit pushing RenderMonkey. We'll probably end up using it in this project (especially if I can get extra help from her).

NASDAROVIA!

[That's a Russian toast she taught me]

I managed to squeeze in some time for Scott. Technically, I'm still on PoliticalMachine. It's just that the current project is taking up all my time.

I spent quite a bit of time today working with Cari to get our ships to display properly on the board.

The rest of the day I dedicated to getting the lighting situation squared away. To that end, I decided to not to use DX9 effects. They'll come in later. As soon as I can get a good handle on RenderMonkey we'll be incorporating it. If you haven't heard of or used RenderMonkey, I think you should. Check it out at ATI's site. It's quite a step up from EffectEdit, which I've been using.

http://www.ati.com/developer/sdk/radeonSDK/html/Tools/RenderMonkey.html

Anyways, back to the project. We're now using the FixedFunction TnL for our ships now. I managed to get the lighting situation squared away. Our ships are lit properly and the stars even emit light. Check it out.

Finished off the day by making sure all our stuff was checked in and adding some special camera lerping code to do the "Alexg" effect when you zoom the camera. Really, it looks like the "Ken Burns" effect.