Plan for Brian Ramage

TSE milestone 2 is complete, and milestone 3 is well underway, so I thought
it would be a good time to share my thoughts on where we're going with it.
The main goal of MS3 is to tighten up the engine for more general consumption.
We want to fix some of the more annoying bugs and streamline some areas so
working with the materials is easier. We'd also like to increase performance,
particularly on nVIDIA FX cards.

Here are some of the major improvements planned:
- Get FSAA fully working
- .DDS support and more DXT compression options
- Fix skinning code with interpolated tangent space vectors
- Get an Atlas terrain editor working
- Add a texture / material flush so artists don't need to reload TSE to tweak materials
- Pre-load materials/shaders/other resources on level load
- Better .dif warnings if they are incorrect version
- Material enhancements
- Alpha test
- Parallax mapping
- More blend operations for cubemaps
- More procedural shader options
- Better control over specular colors
- ... much more

In addition, I've got an update of Materials coming up next week that has:
- client side Materials / ShaderData / CubemapData
- auto loading of materials.cs from subdirectories - so they can live with the data
- got rid of addMaterialMapping() calls - the mapping is done in the Material itself now
- full path names of textures are no longer needed

I'll explain these improvements in greater detail when the updates go live.

Figuring a timeline for MS3 is tough at this point as we have a LOT going on behind the
scenes right now. Josh should be releasing a "bounty" list for MS3 tasks that we'd pay
to get done, so we're hoping that can speed the development a bit. We've also got the
possibility of GG co-founder Tim Gift making a guest star appearance for MS3. He might
break out some goodies (OpenGL anyone?).