Monolith's Mike Dussault updated his .plan with a massive update on the status of LithTech 2, the next version of the engine that powered Shogo and Blood 2, and will be behind Third Law Interactive's KISS: Psycho Circus title. Here are a few memorable quotes:

Support for 32-bit textures and screen surfaces has been in for a while. I'm very happy with the way it's structured.. all the color conversion code was strewn out before but now it is cenralized, clean, and simple. It's definitely better to be using 32-bit textures and a 16-bit screen than 16-bit textures and a 32-bit screen.

We have a SoftImage terrain exporter now. This is a huge leap over the previous way we made terrains. It's much faster and easier to texture and manipulate the terrains in Soft.

There are some new tricks the preprocessor does to optimize the terrains. It can sometimes strip out 65% of the polies on the terrain with no noticeable difference.Detail textures really enhance the look of our terrain. It really makes the texture on the terrain look larger and more detailed. The goods...

The model lighting is much more accurate now. Models can be lit accurately from lights placed in the environment, so you can get nice subtle bits of light all over them.We're playing around with different blending modes that work well for things like the sun and clouds passing overhead.