WOW. So I Conquered two HUGE and extremely long standing problems in the past 2 days.

The first is, I FINALLY got the ATI drivers working for my Radeon 9800 Pro under Linux ( Ubuntu ) which all in all is pretty damn important considering I primarily use Linux for developing a 3D graphics engine. So now I'm not running about 30 FPS in Linux ;)

Let me tell you, it was a pretty damn good feeling seeing:
"Direct rendering: Yes"
after typeing:
glxinfo | grep rendering
So SO SSSOOOO many times and seeing No.

Any way, with that finally set, I went back to debugging my memory corruption bug and low and behold! I KILLED IT! You can now load a level, then load another one and it will clean up the memory and get it going again.

There is still quite a bit of memory leaks to track down, but with Valgrind, my new best friend, that won't take very long!

So looking forward. The big news is, after very long deliberation I have decided to integrate 3 new 3rd party libraries.

The first is the Configurable Math Library (CML). I'm going to retire my custom Math Lib to get a more standardized and unit tested base math library. It should be faster as well.

The second is the Open Dynamics Engine. It is an open source physics engine that looks really sweet. It will handle movement, collision, all that fun stuff. Should allow for some REAL cool stuff in the future and doing all that physics math isn't the point of this project. I'm making a Game Engine, not a Physics Engine, they are two totally separate projects these days.

The third is the Irrklang 3D Sound Engine. This is absolutely the sweetest library I've worked with in a long time. It is just freaking perfect and has influenced me on certain design ideologies I would like to implement as I go along.

At some point I will be integrating a networking library as well, I have my eye on the networking layer that garage games puts out. I forget the name at the moment. But it looks sweet.

So probably the next thing will be to clean up some of the more egregious memory leaks ( My poor poor texture manager not deleting properly :( ). Then research the ODE and see how I will be integrating it into Black Engine. Once I have a good handle on that I will integrate the CML, then ODE.

Hopefully during this time Naxos will be working on the model loading and rendering!

Well I've said it before and I'll say it again but I mean it more then ever this time, stay tuned because theres going to be some very neat things to come!!

- Adam