For those of you that don't follow the forum, you are missing out on a lot of great stuff. Lucky for you, I am going to highlight three of my favorite things that have popped up.

First in the spotlight, we have Silb's Lugaru total conversion: Lugaru Temple. This replaces the original campaign in Lugaru and puts you in control of Turner's brother Sven. For screenshots and instructions on how to install it, see the original thread. Yes, with virtually no help from David, Silb managed to reverse engineer Lugaru's mapping code and breathe new life into Lugaru. Silb's campaign is longer, features a relatively complicated story line involving multiple controllable characters, and really pushes the Lugaru engine to the limit, with things that you wouldn't think possible in a third party map.

Secondly, we have Vib Rib's incredible Lugaru web comic.

I have mirrored the first seven installments on the Wolfire site here but I also suggest you read the original thread to get all of the discussion and background.

And finally, we have another contribution from Silb just a few days old: Lugaru the Musical. It needs no further introduction.

I just got normal mapping (with or without specular lighting) integrated into the game engine properly, so we can render detailed bumpy surfaces such as wrinkles in cloth or ornate carvings. We are making sure to keep the normal mapping toned down and realistic, so we can avoid the shiny-plastic look plaguing many recent games.

I basically applied the grass shader to Turner, and this is what he looks like! I am going to have to tweak it a lot to make it look more like fur (anisotropic lighting, edge highlighting, etc)

I thought the grassy areas were looking a little bit flat, so I started working on the grass rendering. It uses the same general principle as the old grass system (fin/shell volume rendering) but now it uses vertex and pixel shaders to look better and run faster.

I just added procedural texture blending to the Phoenix terrain; it now blends between different textures based on slope, and between variations of the same texture to reduce tiling artifacts.