@Jeff, I am following your progress with excitement! It is fantastic that you are closing in on the SCN format, and that it can be changed. And thank you for posting your progress as you go, it is very interesting to read. Good work!
Look forward to documentation, and hopefully making some tower graphics.
About the wave stuff, I believe you regarding the doubling of textures. But we might be talking about different things. Just to be clear, I did not mean changing the cycling speed of the textures, but rather the speed of the sine wave mesh animation:
By the way, here is a quote from the interview with Mike Jones of Dynamix, from the interview found here on subsim.com:
"Jones: The waves were conceived fairly early, before a development team was assembled. I needed to put together a demo/proof of concept and had the opportunity to work with Tim Gift [Tim is the director of Tribes, a soon-to-be released Dynamix product] on that. He put together a quick demo of the rolling waves by introducing sine wave motion to a grid and texturing it. It looked good, but needed to be speeded up. After the project got underway, another programmer, Peter Lukaszuk, took the concept and developed the waves as you see them in the game. And they hardly take any processor time. The funny thing is that I never asked Peter how he did the waves; I mean the exact method. People would come up to me at shows and asked how we did the waves, and I could honestly reply, "I don’t know"."