Heheh. Satis, do you try to impress me? So, it finaly worked, hehe. But, aye, my VERY thanks for the answer that finaly and absolutely satisfy my inexhaustible curiosity about 360 FOV rendering you talked about. I REALY appreciate your patience while playing these little games with me.
Now is time to reveal what I have, if you're interested to hear, of course. Clypto Eye 2.0 2nd edition can do this:
1. 360 x 180 h/v visibility range, 1500 polygons (two sided, all moving around by a linear functions, interactively with the camera moving), 4 spot lights, without any shadows or interactive sounds, wireframe mode.
2. Using OpenGL as shell in 1024x768, 16bit color depth, 2x antialiasing (partial).
3. Tested on: P3 Duron 1.2GHz 64kB L2 cache, GeForce2 MX400 64MB, FSB 100MHz.
gets 132-156 FPS.
If I add about 12MB of textures (uncompressed) and remove wires, I get 102-108 FPS.
With overall colision detection, medium quality AI, sounds etc. it shouldn't be more slower than many of 3D Engines in in-game mode.
Err... but on the rest of thing:
I mentioned I talk about applying that in game, haven't I. So, I talk about the most optimized (bauty/speed) 3D-drawing mode.
3D Texture? Since I do just-draw-it-3d-programming-works, this is the first time I hear for something like that. First thing that comes to mind is that 2D texture outstretched over the vertex shall do the job more-less effectively (perhaps, after more much sweat, tears, and frustration while you force it to do what you want). Second thing comes to mind is that animated 2D texture is actualy 2D x time = 3D. If you have time, one explaination shall do.
Do you played Flanker 2.0? There clouds are pretty good, especialy during you fly through them. That would satisfy most of players I say. Still easy to render. There are not lens flares around the sun, but I had to test them and they take about 10-13 FPS to describe the sun bless proper.
I said textures. You do not use only one, do you? 30MB (uncompressed, in memory) is pretty normal for some good-look in-game scene. So, feel free to make more textures which will have sum-size about 30MB.