I went ahead and added some simple diffuse & specular lighting, took the metallic color into account, and added emissive as well.
I spent several hours tracking down a maddening bug where the Higgs pistol's tex coords were completely screwed. Turns out the higgs pistol T coords were negative, but usually the texture sampler was in wrap mode, so it worked anyway. I fixed it with Unwrap3D by moving the tex coords in range so clamp mode would work properly.
I also mananged to break mip-mapping when adding the emissive color support, so I had to fix that. Basically, I wasn't sure if the diffuse alpha in the full-screen alpha texture was valid ( which is now used for the emissive mask ), so I used the passed in tex coords for entities rather than the screen-space projected texcoords. Of course, the code wasn't all changed, so this caused some issues. I ended up ensuring that the diffuse alpha was properly updated, and low and behold, I had mip-mapping working again, and emissive, too.
I also found & fixed a problem with non-shadowed lights not casting any light on entities. The ship level showed this most obviously, because I turned off shadows for all on-board lights. It fits the level better and runs faster, and this way your player shadow won't project onto a screen or panel in an obstructive manner.
This morning my main task was to make the user interface elements more resolution independent. The UI was set up for 1024 x 768, so I have simply kept that, but added x & y scale factors derived from the actual resolution to place the guns, health bars and entity status.
In the process, I tested screen resolution changes, and found and fixed a cegui bug that caused a crash inside of d3d9. Does anyone know how to submit a fix for cegui?
The game is not quite wide-screen friendly. There are separate values in the render.txt file for field_of_view and aspect ratio, but no in-game way to tweak them.
I also ran into another mysterious debug mode d3d issue. My game has never rendered properly under debug d3d mode, although there are no warnings given as to why. I have also stepped through the game in perfhud and seen no reason why. I do an unusual but legal set of render target switches, and it seems to throw d3d in a loop in such a way that dest alpha stops being updated ( making all lighting in my game go away ), and now a new problem surfaces when I recreate the device that makes the main viewport pure white.
Later this afternoon I will get more of the user interface displayed, like the charater's element inventory, and an indicator when you hit one of the number keys to select a weapon slot.
Here is a shot of the fixed entity lighting on the guns :
