You weren't joking when you said "just started"
LOL. That will be a collectors item one day. To be fair, I already know C++ and OpenGL fairly well so it's partly a refresh course for me (and also getting to grips with Max).
The desktop image is a fantastic picture I found that a guy made by taking images every night with a camera on a motorized stand, and shows the entire visible Universe from Earth. Sphere.x is a simple sphere I made in 3DS Max with just under 1000 polygons, the normals are Inverted and the desktop image resized to 2048x2048 applied as a texture.
I just got to the point where i've setup the basic render pipeline, loaded that mesh, textured it and displayed on screen as a "skydome" (except it's a sphere not half a sphere). I'm going to look into multithreading tomorrow, and split out the render pipeline from the input pipeline and implement some basic xbox pad controls so you can pan around. I'm also going to tidy up the renderer so that it uses the "Chain of Responsibility" pattern, this is going to be a solar system renderer - so the polygon count won't be massive and I can get away with not burying my head in esoteric optimisations. (I can also nick textures from NASA, so don't need art skills
![Smile :) :)](/styles/default/xenforo/vbSmilies/Normal/smile.gif)
). Worst case I suspect will be 100K polygons on screen, that will be with 100 planets/moons - something like Oblivion hits around 800,000 - 1,000,000 on heavy scenes.
The biggest learning curve for me is Visual Studio to be honest, haven't done any MS coding for 15 years or so. DX looks a lot easier than OpenGL so far, but all of the shader part of the pipeline is new to me.
Edit: Added mention of pattern.