On the side are images of some of the games I am playing these days and like very much.

NOVEL -
Now for the novel. It is mainly High Fantasy. If you liked JRR Tolkien and Robert Jordan then this is the book for you.
The main theme is friendship as far as one person even goes on alone to get his friend out of captivity from protagonist. And then there are some others also who are on the same track but for a very different reason contrasting what friends do, people in need do and malicious people do.

The world is earth like but with magic, portals and a different geography then our own .Though it is still medieval fantasy.

Graphics
Voxel Technology, a favourite of Jhon Carmack is still not Hardware accelarated, which he thinks to bring in Id Tech 6. That maybe possible with Intels Larrabee or Nvidia's CUDA. But I donot think it will be before 2012. Well people say it will make fully destructible environments in games easily possible.
Shaders
A good way for managing shaders is to make shader code reside in one .fx file and then feed the parameters through different .mtl files. This makes it possible to manage large amount of shader permutations. few .fx files and many .mtl files. I think Mass Effect also uses this approach, which I am currently playing. Though the best shaders are arguably in Crysis lowest image. So real.