A ton of progress has been made on the engine - most notably, I fixed the horrid slowdown problem, and it all came down to one stinking line, as I figured it would.
First, the engine's been renamed, again, to CDXSE (C-sharp DirectX Shooter Engine). XType was nice, but just a tad too close to that legendary Irem shooter with the similar name.
This is the advice I mentioned in my topic:
Make sure to actually enable mipmapping when you're doing your device renderstate handling. I thought DirectX did this by default, and I've yet to see a DirectX tutorial which explicitly sets the mip filtering renderstate... here I thought my laptop video system was all messed up, or something was going horrendously wrong in my code.
After turning the mipfiltering state on, I've seen increases of 10-20 fps on my laptop, and many more on my desktop.In fact, if I turn the frame limiter off, I can render a background/terrain mesh, my player ship, and even shoot a few bullets, and my framerate stays steady at around 380 fps. Before, I couldn't go above 40.
Also, somewhat along with that, I found that using my current optimizations, I can have around 1500 bullets on screen before I dip below 60 fps. That's on my big desktop machine though, so we'll see how well it fares on my lower spec machine. Might be closer to half that.
I'm working on the physics stuff now, and I got rather lucky - I found a very nice .NET ODE wrapper, here:
http://www.thejamesrainenetwork.co.uk/ODE/ode.html
I was trying to mess with the Newton SDK and it's .NET wrapper, but this is much nicer. There are even examples on the guy's site for .NET!
Anyhow, barring unforseen problems, I'm hoping to have a binary to demonstrate progress in two weeks or so. Classes will be starting back up soon, as well as my other job, so we'll see if I get any time at all to work on the truly important things.