You might be able to get something useful for lightning with a l-system (lindenmayer system), though I've not thought about lightning enough to say that it's definitely useful for you. Bung the term into google and see what comes up .

Alternatively, you might want to go slightly over the top ^_^ with this paper, greatly simplified of course.

I think Sulaco has an OpenGL example with lightning between two spheres, if my memory serves. That might give you some ideas.

If you're looking to blend your lightning then I'd suggest Project Omega instead of DelphiX. For one thing, it's under development, meaning you can hassle the dev'ers for features. Also, Bobby has made a sample for it that displays 2000 translucent sprites. There's absolutely no way that you could approach that with DelphiX, since you'd have to do translucency on the CPU the hard way. You probably won't need that much firepower yet, but it's nice to have it sitting around for later .