Nah, its all bells and whistles. Consider our "indie" games to be cattle... no matter how much makeup you throw on the cow its still and cow, and with our facilities in the blitz biz thats all we are doing is presenting cows with makeup haha. let ID software and Valve do the breath taking stuff. Think about it. Even if we COULD do what they do, they will always have the money and means to do it better and faster and prettier. And naturally none of us will be published under a big time contract no matter what we do. Thats the whole point of indie games in my opinion. If you play your game without shadows and bumpmapping for more than 10 mins then you wont even notice, nor know what it is or how it could have improved your game. Get a good game play setup, let the players imerse themselves in the game, not the glammor and sparkles. Thats what most games now a days seem to be... pretty.. thats it... first person shooting pretty. AND like I said... if you design all of your content to work under dx 7 and it looks like crap, but the game play is great, the ideas are worthy and the thing is addictive.. then port it to a real engine and use the same content... at that point all you'd have to do is make displacement bump specular and normal maps.. the rest of the work is done from before ;)