After a long struggle with character weapons and equipment, Caveman now draws everything in the game. Some of the stuff still needs work, but at least it draws something.
I need to get caught up on posting screenshots.
making the cloud particle system use world coordinates as opposed to camera relative coordinates is next. Clouds are alpha blended. so they're sorted on range to camera. the world is divided up into chunks or "map squares" of 26400x26400 d3d units (feet), IE 5x5 miles. each map square has its own d3d coordinate system. when the player changes map squares, the world origin changes, so the camera's coordinates change to compensate. this sudden change of camera x or z by 26400 units changes the sort order of the clouds slightly (IE the difference between x,z locations 5000,0 and 5000,26399 for example). so the clouds "jump" slightly when you change map squares. the fix is to use world coordinates, IE map square x,z plus d3d x,y,z in the map square. when the player leaves a cloud far behind, its regenerated on the leading face of the could cube area that surrounds the camera.
the general idea of the cloud particle system is you have a cube shaped area that surrounds the camera (a "cloud box") that's full of cloud particles. info from the weather engine is used to move the particles, and to determine the number active. when a particle moves out of the "cloud box", a new position is randomly generated for it on the opposite face of the cloud box from the face it exited through. the cloud box moves with the camera. when the cloud box moves so a cloud exits the box, again, the new position for the cloud is randomly generated on the opposite face. by "on the opposite face, i mean in that direction and at that range from the camera - IE somewhere on that face of the cloud box.
right now the could system doesn't use world coordinates, and its not hooked up to the weather engine. it just draws 100% cloud cover and stationary clouds (IE cloudcover 1.0f, windspeed 0.0f, winddir 0.0f weather settings) for testing the alpha blend effect. but the api's already exist to hook the two together.