--------------------------------------------------
I have actually been working pretty hard on Squishy, but it is all mainly under the hood stuff and not really screenshottable. I've changed the system so that a level no longer requires an instance of Squishy to run and Squishy can be deleted when he dies, so there is no longer need to track existance state within every method.
I previously had the game mode track an actor instance to update the camera which meant I had to be really careful to ensure the actor was there all the time and was not sure how to approach informing the game state if the actor got deleted.
Now, instead, I have a camera (just a D3DXVECTOR3) that is accessible by the actors in their update methods. If it is just left alone, it stays pointing at one point on a level, but Squishy can update the camera in his own update method. This way, there is no need for the game mode to be aware of any particular actors.
I've also improved the render-to-texture system with a RenderContext class that binds to a Texture (or the back buffer) and a DepthStencil, has an Apply() method that sets them as the current render target and automatically releases them, which has tidied up a lot of the code.
--------------------------------------------------
I finally overcame some image generation problems when I discovered that Gimp has a Colour To Alpha method.
When I discovered this, I temporarily made the sky solid white in Squishy and zoomed the camera in a lot then print-screened Squishy (he is procedurally rendered you see).
I was then able to convert the white to alpha using Gimp's tool, and save it as a 256x256 icon. IcoFx then did a sterling job of shrinking down to the other icon sizes (IcoFx is the best in the world for down-sizing icons in my view) and I now have an icon with proper alpha rather than some horrible stray pixels around the edge.
--------------------------------------------------
Beer, beer, beer. Beer, beer, beer. [repeat until incomprehensible then fade out]
