Hi Mike,

> aside from the possibility of environment mapping, are there any other possibilities, like additional lights,
> specular additions, ambient occlusion or anything else that the standard DirectX engine may provide.

Could you maybe clarify by what the "additional lights" part is about? MoI does currently generate a environment lighting map using 12 light sources to generate the map, it could be possible to have some other methods for generating the light map in the future, but it takes quite a bit of effort to do nice quality lighting and also figure out good controls for adjusting it.

Other stuff like ambient occlusion are difficult to do without using shaders and requiring kind of higher end cards.


> So it's there and it works... Would you ever include a standard viewport option for
> rendering quads or poly+quads in normal use?

Yeah it could be possible in the future to do some work for bringing in polygon models. But having rendering of them in place is I'm afraid only one small piece of the puzzle, selection interaction, UI and workflow planning and things like that are much more problematic than just display itself. One general problem with having mesh geometry at model time is having 2 very different kinds of models which don't interact with one another really well. It leads to problems like someone opens a polygon model file and then draws a sphere in MoI and then wonders why those 2 objects won't boolean with each other.


> The New and Improved-Improved-Blend... with the ability to add control shapes along the
> surface-route and those "rolled pencil" (?) perpendicular control shapes you were talking about.
> Hmmm. (just keep it on your list)

Yup, it's still on the list!


Re: Shearing
I'm still kind of hoping that a flexible enough cage edit command would be able to do this job rather than having a totally separate shear command.

- Michael