And yeah, if there is gravity on the planet (which i\'m sure there is) won\'t the stalactite maybe drop and crash, which could mean the end to us all.

huhm... one thing a lot of people don\'t realize is that gravity actually decreases when someone goes deeper inside a planet, down to the point of zero gravity at its center, for the simple reason that the rest of the planet is pulling from every direction around us. Given this small note that, to be honest, has little or no relation to Planeshift, let\'s move to the real topic of my reply: I am amazed by how people find perfectly normal dragons and spells in games, which I am pretty sure they never had a chance to meet in real life, and at the same time find so many difficulties understanding a huge stalactyte created and kept together by magic...
Mysteries of the human mind...  

Mostly we use MAX and Maya, with some custom export programs/scripts. More info about them can be found in CS CVS.

LOD has been introduced for thing in CS a very short time ago, but it\'s in our plans to use it.
As for the creation of diffferent object LODs, we prefer creating them by hand, since it gives us a much higher degree of control on how the shape is changed when reducing polycount. This talking about static things.
For sprites (that in CS language are IE characters and monsters), we have a new character animation library that implements progressive meshes and thus takes care of the polyreduction of moving objects automatically.

Clipping planes hidden by fog were not a viable solution with the old CS renderer (in fact they would have resulted in worse performance); with the new renderer that is under development and that should be part of CB, we should be able to make some use of them.

tiny problem with your theory  if you were to design a map for Planeshift you would have to use a 3D program such as Maya or 3DSmax. These are 3D programs not programming tools. You could not just \'make\' portals.  It isn\'t as simple as going in Maya and selecting a \'portal\' sprite.  

This is obviously false    In fact, you do select a polygon and turn it into a portal. No programming required.

I think the idea is possibly seeing some original stuff, not things found in another games, since we will not copy them. Think about the possibility of having something you designed being included ingame, and start using your pencils ;-)

We are not against fog for a question of principle. Let\'s try to clarify a bit this question:

1) you can get an increase in framerate by rendering less objects on screen.
2) you can have less objects to render on screen by applying a far clipping plane = past a certain distance from you the objects are simply not drawn.
3) when objects beyond the clipping plane (=not visible) travel through it because you are getting closer to them, there is a visible popping effect = those objects appear suddenly out of thin air, with an effect that is not nice to see.
4) to hide the popping around the clipping plane, usually a fog layer is applied: it conceals the point where the objects appear, but the objects are still being drawn, even if covered by the fog.

This said, why don\'t we have fog in MB?

a) because the clipping plane was not working or implemented or efficient when we released it, so we did not have to hide points where objects were appearing.
b) (very important) because fog had to be drawn in a second pass over the already rendered houses, thus contributing in reducing even more the framerate.

Of course there are plans to solve these questions, and the CS team is steadily progressing in order to have a viable solution. But what I\'d want to make clear is that adding fog is not the magical solution to the fps problem, and that we\'ve been considering its implementation (with all the correlated features) in MB: if it\'s not there it\'s not because we simply ignored the existence of it, but because of precise technical reasons.

Hmm to calculate how much you must ask, you should calculate the cost of all your computers, the OS licenses, the game licenses, the rent, the electricity, the public gaming spot license cost, the taxes, the life expectation of your hardware before it needs to be replaced, the expected players volume, the necessary personnel with relative salaries and social extras, the share between earnings and reinvestment, and at the end of all that, you can see how much you can ask for 1 hour of LAN gaming without bankrupting after 2 days ;-)

Ahem... could I have a proof of power please? I don\'t know: make cats rain from the sky, turn water into beer, reverse the entropy... that kind of things I would expect from a powerful person...