So, it turns out I basically won't be able to get my hands on Vista as a D3D10 dev platform, so I'm probably going to just take a break from that stuff.

There are two graphics things on my mind though that I've been thinking of and trying to come up with solutions for: area lighting and memory virtualization (emulation).

For a linear area light, I've got the basic idea down, but in my implementation I've been having problems with the diffuse light integration. Basically, the idea is that since the N dot L term should be normalized, it turns into just the cosine value, so then the formula integrates between two cosine values (i.e. integrate the light from L1 to L2). That is simply a conversion to sin vals, and then subtracting the difference, which is, from a math pov, fairly trivial (from a shader pov? Nooot as much). The identity cos^2+sin^2=1 is just rearranged to sin=sqrt(1-cos^2). Anyways, I've got that working, but the problem is that just using that, the values have to be added OR subtracted, since the sin value will always be positive (a side effect of the sqrt function). Now, the integration works fine, I've punched in two formulae on my ti83 that shows what the final result of the lighting is, and assuming the add/sub is chosen correctly, it works fantastically. The problem I've been having is that the add/sub ISN'T chosen correctly right now, so that's something I'm looking into. (For those curious, the method I'm using right now is to calculate the reflection of one of the light vectors about the normal, and comparing the results of L1 dot L2 and R1 dot L2)

Memory virtualization is the other thing I want to talk about, primarily with respect to John Carmack's memory virtualization antics. I want to finalize my thoughts on this, so I'll probably make an edit later (a few hours from now, during my lunch break). Basically, the idea that I want to experiment with is to, say, for a terrain system, figure out what parts of a really really big texture (i.e. >4kx4k) are needed when drawing a frame by using something like a memory management algo JC proposed several years ago in a .plan update, combined with some other memory address manipulation stuff.