Quote: "I'm loving this project and it's coming so far from the first demo (which was still awesome). Great GUI, and explosions."
Quote: "Personally, I think the cartoon contrasts nicely with the realism, but you're not making this game for me, so other people's opinions might be different."
I agree that the two styles contrast nicely, but a more realistic character could look a lot nicer. That's why I'll create some more realistic looking textures for the character and use a different shader, and see which one most people would prefer.
Quote: "Randomness 128 how did you do this effect?"
The firey explosion and the smoke near the top (which is part of the smoke trail the rocket left behind) are 3D plains that always face the camera. The wave around the explosion is also a 3D plain, but it uses a refraction shader to distort the appearance of everything on the other side of it.
Quote: "This piece of junk? Nah, I can fry an egg on it running even some 2D games Seriously, for example I can play FF7 on it for like an hour if I rig it up higher for some better airflow. It's a laptop with 2-2½ years on the neck, nice for coding though."
This computer is 2½ years old. It supports shader model 3 and can play games such as Half Life 2, Far Cry, Doom 3, Call of Duty 2 and F.E.A.R. at the highest settings at a reasonable resolution (Far Cry ran at 1920x1080 with the highest settings at 30fps, but I'd rather have the frame rate higher than that). But it's not a laptop.
Does yours support shader model 1.4 at least?