Monolith Programmer Mike Dussault updated his .plan with talk of seeing Ministry, email, and LithTech2 programming, which is, of course, the part quoted below:

The first iteration of the terrain functionality is in now. Wes has been busting out cool terrain levels for a while
and everything is proceeding smoothly. I know I will have to revisit terrain a couple times in the next couple months to get it better and better, but the hardest part is over.

As part of the terrain work, the engine's top-level search structure is a quadtree instead of a BSP tree now. (Changing to an octree is very easy, but we don't need it for NOLF). This comes in handy, is faster for certain operations, and handles non-indoor games better than a BSP as well, so I'm glad this got in.

While working on model LOD, I found a way to rework the skeletal animation loop to be MUCH faster. I can't believe I missed this before.. it was so obvious, but it's a relief to have the LT2 models rendering at the speed one would expect.

I'm very pleased with the way the model LOD came out. It's much simpler than the Shogo method (which was similar to Intel MRM) and is a lot more efficient. In the game, we will be using a set LOD offset for each GAME detail level (ultra-high, high, medium, low), and the animators can tweak out what each version will look like. The transitions between LODs are smoothed out so you can only tell it's doing LOD if you really look hard.

The model rendering will get another pass in the not too distant future, and I'm expecting even more performance gains. Sometimes this kind of thing bites me in the ass though.. envision this scenario, "I am specifying 1/3 of the vertices as before, but it renders slower!" Or how about, "I removed 20% of the transforms, but it renders slower!" There are those who say there's a reason for everything, and there are those who use 3D APIs...

Primary things left to address for LT2 (I'm leaving these extremely general because I'm sure I'll end up doing the exact opposite of whatever I say here :)
- Lighting enhancements
- Networking
- Mods
- More model optimizations
- More terrain optimizations
- General renderer optimizations.. I have some ideas that I'm very excited about