Jim, I am a little like you I think. I am not a mathematician (I have to step through maths code a few dozen times), I was never taught programming and I don’t work well in a team but given a unique idea and the tools I can progress quite fast
As for the features like “shadows of fish on the plants, and shadows of plants on the floor” and “bubbles to deflect of fish” I would go for the simplest one to implement first (e.g bubbles deflecting off the fish).
But even then the simplest feature could have complexities that delay the implementation of that simple feature.
e.g DirectX could report the x,y,z position of the fish or bubbles to be not where it your can see the fish or bubble (e.g in Directx 8.1 the mesh of a fish may start anywhere from 0,0,0, axis e.g 0,0,100) due to the exporting for ther fish from your 3d mesh editing tool. So you have to add steps to insure the mesh is centered at 0,0,0 axis.
Or the bubble is deflected to right of the fishbut the fish then decides to move to the right and the bubble calculations have to be re done every again. After adding in heaps of these smaller requests the code becomes larger and the frame rate drops. So you then have to have a settings screen to enable and disable the extra AI to speed up the code.
I know in DirectX 8.1 there is a helper class to cast shadows onto a mesh (
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/de...adowVolume.asp ) but I doubt it works for lumpy surfaces like meshes.
>Keep up the good work, and don't get depressed.
Thanks, your words of advice are almost like words from God him/her self