After a time of brief absence, I came back to HLP only to witness a freaking renaisance in the making. In the past 2-3 weeks, there has been so much progress made that I can hardly keep up.
Lightspeed's shine maps, the 32-bit colour capabilities, the new background rendering system, the new ship trails (slightly older, but cool nevertheless), Raven's models, Turnsky's Foxfire stuff and more stuff that I can't even remember.
When I look at stuff like Lightspeed's shine map thread, and see the Hecate and Haphaestus (sp?) looking like they've been pulled from the latest AAA game, it gives me hope for the future. I don't really think that I am fully expressing just how cool all this stuff is. We have advanced more in the past 2 months than n the past year.
Though I have mentioned the awesomeness in a few indivdual threads, I just thought that everyone who has contributed to this process should be congratulated - way to go guys.