Irrlicht Engine

Ok. I've checked how they do to create portals methods and your're right. They mostly use and occtree to calculate for the occlusion.
What are the benefit of creating this manually in an editor?

Unfortunately no, we have no method for creating portals automatically, it's done by hand. I do it ...

I implemented decal clipping for Lightfeather, if it would be helpful for anyone working on it here you can see my source at http://lightfeather.de/cgi-bin/hg/lightfeather/file/7f807555ecb0/src/resources/basicmodels/CDecalModel.cpp
Algorithm taken from an old article in Game Programming Gems 2 ...

Is your title from Pnik Floyd's "Breathe"? It definitely made me think of that song

I believe Cg shaders are the only fully cross-platform shaders in the sense that a cg shader can be compiled for use with directx or opengl, and the Cg API provides functions for handling Cg shaders in both OpenGL and DirectX . To the best of my knowledge this is not possible with HLSL or GLSL ...

Ah, I'm sorry. I must have read too quickly and misunderstood.

For the love of all things good, do not use xml as the sole format for an internal engine filetype. Not for storing vertex and index data, anyway. It's far too slow to load. Collada is XML because it's an interchange format. .obj is similarly used as an interchange format. An xml format is good in ...

changes to the driver model and the windows kernel are why it only works on Vista on.

Despite all the horrifying stories a few months ago, it appears that OpenGL is going to work on Vista too. Does that mean it will no longer work on previous Windows versions, Linux, PlayStation, and a million ...

but its supposed to be capable of a lot more (and since its running in the shader units its directly accessable by the pixel shaders in the new unified shader model, making it perform a lot better than would be right now)

I'm sure D3d 10 will have some cool stuff, and I'll certainly admit ...

Yeah, looks like displacement mapping on one fish and not on the other. Do they think displacement mapping isn't already possible?

Nice. I'm impressed by the amount of city area you've created. A couple comments.

1) I'd suggest using different data file for different levels rather than using multiple executables

2) If you want the gun to have a kick (tho a small pistol doesn't need much of one) I'd suggest having it jerk you ...

Hmm, there're fewer resources that come up under a search than I expected.

Blizzard recently made a portal system, but I think it's only for transporting, not culling http://irrlicht.sourceforge.net/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=12806&highlight=portals

There's a very old portal culling system here http ...

There have been several user-created portal systems, search the forums

if you like hlsl syntax better than glsl but want to use OpenGL, try Cg. Its supported under both API's and is basically hlsl syntax compatible

It's better than really expensive commercial software with no free version, give it a break

If shadows are only possible on animated mesh's, sounds like a bug someone should fix rather than something that should be worked around. Fixing it in the engine source will prolly be less of a hassle in the long run then trying to deal with workarounds