I prefer to avoid this when possible, more for the crew costs than out of the goodness of my heart. 
Egg shell cases and the burvix caster are usually enough trading fodder for me to get what I need.

Greetings, hunam!

Cool pics. So now I guess it is Irrlicht vs. OGRE.

Heh, perhaps. Muller finds irrlicht easier to implement than OGRE, although from what I've seen of the two engines, OGRE's a bit more high-end.

Good news, our prototype now compiles flawlessly on OSX:

Hopefully, the only differences you'll see are the title bar and the jpeg compression!

A little update for those interested...
we are currently prototyping a true 3d engine using irrlicht.

Here's a quick hack of a walkaround map with collision detection and a fixed camera angle:

Most of the game will probably be like this. (Not art-wise, the map and the character are just some stuff from quake.)

Here's the "world map" we've been prototyping, which will allow you to travel between 'floating' continents in an airship:

(Muller and I made the crappy looking models, the cool jet is from vegastrike.)

The plan is to finish these prototypes as proof-of-concepts in order to get a better idea of how to pull this off. If we find that we can do everything we need to do with irrlicht, all 2d plans will be scrapped for good.

Although, if you haven't  "activated" the starbase yet (given them the radioactive), the commander will give you one new lander for free.

Arrr tee eff emm, matey.

Open up the included Manual.txt and search for the "GENERAL GAME CONTROLS SUMMARY" section. It'll do you good.

Welcome!

*looks nervously around for flying pillows*

Haha. I don't think "kanal" helps to clear up the matter much either...

Oh, I saw a video from this... the seamless space to planetary flight was impressive. I think it was posted on the Vega Strike forums as an example for what we'd like to eventually have.

It looks like a very interesting project. Are you involved with it?

Haha! Only in Sweden...

Hm, maybe. Our lead character modeller, Lee, (the guy who modelled that) was also a lead artist on blender's project orange, so he could probably get a plug for us. 

What is the average poly count for the character models (currently?)

Very high. They are currently intented to be used in production renders, not in-game. Lots of subsurfing etc.
Here's an example, the main character mesh which i screencapped in blender (click to enlarge):

and an accompanying render.
Clearly this is extreme overkill for an in-game model that's probably not going to be larger than two inches on the display. This is great for cutscenes or sprites, but lousy if you want to render it in realtime at more than 15 fps...

When I used to work in retail, people would tell me I reminded them of Randell. I'm not sure if that's good or not.

Haha... if I were you I'd take that as a complement. 

I'll have it fixed by tommorrow...

And your ban will expire in 2 weeks.

Ouch... burned.

Otherwise, you'll have to go 3d and discard a lot of your work. Animation in 3d is less memory intensive. However, 3d is much less efficient in terms of computing power, so you'll not be able to render many detailed units.

We actually haven't generated sprites yet, and (like timewarp) our sprites would just be renders of 3D models. So we won't be losing much dataset work by taking the models we have and optimizing them for use in-game instead of rendering them as a sprite.

We may wind up using a combination of prerendered backgrounds and realtime characters, like in Final Fantasy 7.