Perhaps I will do that. Until now I wrote some Graphic effects for the Neoaxis engine/Ogre thing.
I wrote some basic shaders for other environments, but the 3dgs shadersystem seems a little strange to me.
I am an absolut hobby programmer. I wasn't ready to pay 100€ more for a hobby (and for shaders).

Don't forget that the contest is open to beginners to shader programming as well. You could use an existing shader in a small level, maybe tweak its parameters a bit and win the contest.

A professional shader programmer makes a fantastic shader on a beautifully modelled level, and a beginner makes a tadly tweaked existing shader on office.wmp. The beginner, both in shader programming and modelling, has aparantly an equal chance to win as the professional shader programmer. how is the winner chosen, then?

We wait for thunder to strike on targets on the ground, each one with a few names of participants. If the lighting strikes closest to your name, you'll win.

No, I think the 49% of influence makes sure newbies have a chance of winning, but very often the 'best' one wins anyways. Nothing wrong with that in my humble opinion.

The professional shader programmer would have more chances to win if he uses the same (old) shader created by him. Nevertheless, I think that a professional shader programmer would create something amazing from scratch in order to impress the jury.

I do like the thunder-by-chance method.

That's how we used to pick the winners in the past. The global warming has made the things much more dangerous for the jury, so we had to make a change.

G'day!

I've got a busy Friday ahead. The contest deadline is "before the 15th of August". According to which timezone?

Also I'm kinda used to my uni's system with online submission -- 1 minute late and you start losing marks already -- how strict is this deadline? I'm not saying I'm gonna have it very late, but I'm assuming something will go wrong/unexpectedly-slow with packing/publishing and uploading, and as submission is by email (whether it's an attachment or download link) I'm guessing the deadline is at least a little less precise.

Jibb

If it's still the 15th of August in your country you can email me the demo (or the link to it).

Cheers. That's good news.