Boy, what a productive evening. I spent most of it debugging the darn lighting problem that I had earlier. I finally figured it out. The SceneGraph rendering code was severely broken. Some things were being drawn before others were finished. It was a mess. Anyways, fixed it up and now everything is back to normal.

Except. We have serious problems with our lighting scheme. The graphics cards that I play with (including Cari's) can only support up to 8 lights turned on at one time. This explains some of the strange lighting behavior I was seeing even before the scene graph. Some lights would turn on and off when object entered or left the scene. This is because every planet and every star is a light source. We've got a heuristic in there now to try to control the lights, but it will have to be overhauled so that we don't turn on more than 8 lights at a time. This shouldn't be too much of a problem at max zoom, but if it turns into a problem, we may have to do without the planet lighting or star lighting.

I'm pretty happy with the initial implementation of the scene graph. There's still a lot of work to be done, but now at least I can add child nodes with ease. I also took advantage of the pre/post render to do some lighting tricks with the stars so that they always looked lit regardless of our lighting problems.

Here's an example of some of the simple things we can do now that we have a scene graph. This first example took me 2 minutes to hook up and 5 minutes to come up with the artwork. Don't blame me, I'm not an artist. This is what happens when the art czar fails to reply to my instant message at 11:30 at night

Pretty flowers aren't they. They're gears actually. Here's a closeup.

After seeing that, I decided to stick with modeling the world. I'm better at that than trying to create new art. So, here's my crack at a real-world model. I think you'll like it

WARNING: 16MEG VIDEO LINK

What your seeing is a real live moon orbiting a red planet. What you can't see is that the moon orbits faster than the planet and it's local rotation is in the opposite direction of the planet.

Well, that's enough for tonight. I feel much better about the moon than the star halo thingy. That's why I didn't do the rings. I'll leave that to the art guys.