Whilst I write this I'm feeling like one very happy bunny. I've finished writing the first draft of my dissertation, it's only a casual 18,100 words long, 69 pages, easy peasy. If you want to have a look: My webspace contains a PDF (2M
and a DOC (Word 00-03 compatible) file (9M. Zip file in that folder contains old code but the movie shows a cracking process happening.
I'm going to bring attention to one very important part of the evaluation, the performance tests. The image below is the performance graph that's in my dissertation
Look at the polygon count along the bottom and then the time taken up the left. Put simply, for integration into a game, the process must take less than 0.1-0.2 seconds (there are performance improvements to be added, one of them being writing it in C++ and the other being working directly with the Vertex and Index buffers instead of writing to memory first). This limits you to a polygon count of around 600 for a crackable object. Think about it, that's not too much, but it's enough, probably more than enough for most scene objects (look at Unreal Engine 3, most of the detail is in Normal and Relief maps, the actual polygon count hasn't risen much at all). Basically, this can be put in to a game, quite easily too, and it'd look very good and be very effective. Now all that needs to be done is for the right people to listen!
I've actually had a lot of fun doing this project in the last few days. Seeing it all come together is a fantastic feeling which is almost rivalled by the fact that it WORKS!!! (something I still can't believe really). I've learned so much about graphics, game programming design and how object-oriented languages are simply better than anything else. Visual Studio 2005 has been a pleasure to work with and MDX just makes things simple. Something in C++ like optimizing a mesh would involve a whole lot of pointers and guff, in MDX it's just Mesh.Clean(...). Why can't people see that for prototypes and technique tesiting like a project such as this is it's just perfect. If industry prototyped ideas often they should do it in MDX. No arguements.
Ah well, I'll let you know how the final version comes out when it's handed in in 12 days time 
Unfortunatley I now have to work on my other projects that I've ignored (1x concurrent systems, 2x programming language semantics and 1x computer games tech which is implementing an edge collapse algorithm... yay)
Steve
Currently Listening To: Hot Hot Heat
Currently Reading: ... through my dissertation
Currently Watching: Green Wing
Currently Eating: Bananas
Days until deadline: 12