It is worth it writing a software renderer. But beware that it will take you -years- to get really useful results.

I have been working on my swShader renderer for the past few years. It uses dynamic code generation to avoid branching in the inner loops, and supports DirectX 9 shaders. Currently I''m working on a DLL interface.

Yes,it takes long time. My renderer are about one year old ,and many things to be done.
(i have to make exponential atmosphere(nearly ready) ,heh,i have volumetric fog but i don't have exponential atmosphere. Then i need to make water, more realistic cloudshapes,etc,then GUI. Lot of work(but more than half are done).
And before starting i already wrote simple 2d graphics lib(pretty ugly,but i still love my floodfill routine that works
at > 100 FPS :-).

As about shots,yet another one,recently uploaded:
http://dmytrylavrov.narod.ru/images/screenshots/voxel/album4/503.jpg
"hypertexturing"
(my hosting dislike direct linking,so you should copy that address,click on previous link,and then paste that into browser address line.)

[edited by - Dmytry on April 12, 2004 5:39:33 PM]

I''m not really looking to make a full-fledged software renderer, just a basic one. Like I said, it''s going to be a renderer DLL for low-end systems, so I don''t think I''ll want (or even be able to support) too many fancy effects.

@C0D1F1ED: Yeah, I found links to your project browsing through old threads, and I have to say that that''s pretty insane. It must have taken you years to get it this far..

@Dmytry: Saw your page too, your terrain is just amazing. Now if only there was some way to get it above 3 FPS..

I think,if it''s fast enough to upload textures from main memory to card,i can render images to textures (with back sides of mountains too) and then use low-res landscape and billboards to approximate it for seconds ,while rendering next panorame.And when camera are too close and moves too fast,motion blur may be used to hide all artefacts.So it may work at >20 fps.

Also,camera movement should be predicable enough(true for flight-simulators,position for next seconds are known very precisely,no matter what keys player will press)