The animation is what I'm busy with at this moment...
It's just going to use a standard hierarchial list of 'bones' each with it's own position and rotation, which affects all of the child 'bones' linked to the parent bone..
But it's not full skeletal animation since each bone is a separate mesh by itself and not a morphed set of vertexes from a total mesh. In this way I hope to do things like doors, levers, secret switches etc easily since this works very well for non-organic style animation.
Then I'll leave the monsters to use MD3 type animation, so they can have the fluidity of morphing animation..
True, vertex lighting is VERY dependant on triangle count, but I figured that my game would have quite a high triangle count from the beginning.
The only place where you really notice the lack of definition in the lighting is when you have a hard shadow or sudden change in the lighting environment. In my level editor I added in soft shadow calculations which make the scene look *almost* as good as lightmaps, but it's very slow to calculate...
I'm not looking for any jobs soon since I've still got at least 2-3 years left of university to complete..
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