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We must also not forget the extensive part played by the monks of the Middle Ages in preserving culture after the fall of Rome. One could very well say that it was them who formed the West into the great super power we have today.

Hi! Haven't been on these forum for some time, but I think I might provide some additional insight regarding this. Right now the engine constructs material buckets (for batch rendering) every frame. This is something that should stick to the context and simply update it when the context changes (i.e. - a new map is loaded) and when new materials are submitted. As far as sorting techniques by distance is concerned - this is something that has been implemented a bit incorrectly. A better solution would be to have an IShaderTechniqueMgr, that keeps an associated list of materials and dependant models. This would allow for far easier rendering: for(IShaderTechniqueMgr* tech : context->GetTechniques()) { for(IMaterialPass* pass : tech->GetMaterialPasses()) { renderer->SetTechnique(tech->Technique()); renderer->SetMaterial(pass->Material()); for(IModel* model : pass->GetModelsCulled(frustrum)) { renderer->Render(model); } } } Why is this good exactly you ask? Well. You wouldn't be wasting time creating vectors and sorting them all the time. To top it all off, the technique manager or the material pass for the alpha tested objects can update its list of models as needed. I can't begin to describe how much performance boost this would give to the engine. Right now it is true that pyrogenesis isn't really the best graphics engine out there and would require quite a few changes before it could be used properly. Another solution would be to just use an available tried-and-tested open-source graphics engine and stop trying to implement everything by ourselves (which is obviously a bit too much to handle due to lack of programmers). Ogre3D has been mentioned many times before and is a very very good engine. It is supported on majority of platforms and its implementations are well debugged and maintainable. Furthermore, its API is extremely well documented and the engine itself has all the tools needed to build any game engine... (notably including shader managers, material passes and friends). To top it all off, the Windows implementation can use DirectxRenderer (which is a virtual device mind you), making it even faster for Windows nuts. This is just food for thought

Well stated by the Project Leader