| The problem with many asteroids in a scene is finally solved. I spend most of the time optimizing the game loop, rendering and physics. I should have more time now to test and play the game and add some fun to it.
The game is now capable of calculating and updating over 10 000 asteroids (each over 1200 polygons) per frame while maintaining a reasonable framerate, which was not possible a week ago (I got many asteroids, but updating them was very slow and rendering wasn't very fast either). Usually a scene consists of 2-5k asteroids and runs pretty fast (over 100 fps with all shaders on, up to 200 fps without post screen effects). Physics aren't perfect yet, but the basic stuff works. I might need to speed a bit more time on player collisions for more accurate collision checks.
Since the graphics isn't so much different from last week and some new graphical stuff isn't finished yet (items, final sky, on screen layout), I present you today the main menu screen. Pretty boring, but I didn't say there will always be fancy screens every time I post stuff here. I looks much better in action because the background is an automatically updated asteroid field in realtime while the menu is in the foreground.
Other things like sounds and music do work now too. I said that 2 weeks ago already, but now all sound effects are included and Boje did a nice music track for the game.
The game itself is missing too. Flying around works nice, but most of the game elements (menu, items, game dynamics, etc.) are still missing. For the level design I had some nice ideas too, which I will try out this week (required for the optimizations above anyway).
Most of the game should be finished by next week. I will only do an update to DirectX 9 December 2005 as soon as it is available. | 
