All I ended up losing were some pictures, and a couple of mp3s, not a huge deal.
We now have all of the levels lit properly using an ambient cubemap. I used to have separate ambient render passes for with and without ambient cubemaps, but I standardized on requiring one to be specified, or a default gray cubemap will be used.
The indoor levels made the biggest visual improvement with the ambient cubemaps, although most of them didn't have one specified before.
Another big change was to move from SDL_mixer audio to the IrrKlang library. I used fmod ages ago, didn't want to pay the high registration fee, so tried sdl_mixer, had stuttering issues on and off, so I switched to IrrKlang, and now that everything is running with the new system, I'm happy with it.
I had an abstraction layer for sound, which worked well enough in between fmod & sdl_mixer, but it needed some tweaks for irrklang. Also, irrklang didn't support fading in & out of sounds ( which I used for music ), so I had to add that for the music part. I think you probably need at least 3 libraries behind your abstraction layer before it stops needing tweaks for new back-ends.
I did have trouble getting irrKlang to play back 3d audio ( using software 3d buffers ) at the right volume & positions that I wanted, so this morning I changed the code to always give sound positions to irrklang in a 4 meter circle around the listener, and just scale volume myself by my own function.
Currently I'm using vol = sqrtf( 1.0f - dist / max_dist ), and it works well for me. The sqrt is there to make sound fall of less than linearly and pull far sounds a little closer to the listener.
I also made some small improvements to the sound path tracing code that traces sounds from cell to cell through portals, trying to find the listener.
We are now considering making a gallery mini-level to show off some of the content in the registered version to shareware customers, although we may stick with screenshots. We are also considering a gallery for the various clone types available rather than the text menu we have now.
Lastly, we are looking at ways of differentiating the 4 character choices at the start of the game via unique abilities or powers.
