Finished "Fork in the road", and "Man on the run". I'm now working on the "Remember..." mission. This should be the first really large scale fight in the game. I went to a lot of effort to make my ship drawing system as fast as possible (each ship is one draw call), so I hope I don't have any performance issues. It seems like the game is running real well except for two cases:

Nebula's - The overdraw is out of control. But I think I can fix it pretty easily. My Nebula billboards are so transparent that I have to draw a half dozen for you to even see them. This makes the nebulas look great, but I bet I could double the alpha on the billboard, draw half as many and no on would notice the difference.

Creating Asteroids - I do a bunch of math to procedurally create the asteroids (I do a perlin noise on a big grid and then wrap that around a sphere of points). I only do it once per asteroid at creation time, but when you look at level start-up, it's a huge percentage of the time. I could probably spend sometime optimizing it. But I heard that there is a new xna math library coming on line which might be a lot faster and if not, I could always offload asteroid creation to another thread. And, again it is just a start-up cost. After the asteroid is created it's one draw call.

I'd show some video of these missions, but they are starting to get far enough along in the story that they will spoil some of it. So other then demo movies, probably not going to show any more scenes from the game.

Finally, I'm trying to get this level done and some polish for the next dream build play in two weeks. I'm guessing my chances aren't that great, I didn't even make the final 20 last time and I suspect the same thing will happen again this time. As far along as I am, I still have almost 20 missions to go. I'm getting to a point where I can start really making missions quickly, but I'm still very far from done, and I think that's a big part of the criteria.