Self-Evaluation/Reality Check/Future Game Plan

With just over a week until the beta review, here is an evaluation of my progress and what is left to do.  
Looking back at the list of final deliverables, I feel like I still have quite a bit left so I'm trying not to feel too much pressure (deep breaths) but I know I still have quite a bit of work ahead of me.

On the other hand, looking back I feel like I've already accomplished a lot, including all the preliminary research, GUI and camera setup, particle framework, spatial hash table, fluid dynamics, and adding in parameter control.  It would have been nice to have gotten farther along in the surface reconstruction at this point, but other than that I think I'm somewhat on par with my suggested timeline.

I really want to have time to get to the haptics, because I think that will make the end product a lot more dynamic and interesting to play with but I am aware that with the time constraints it is more important to get what I have working fully and play the haptics part by ear.  With this in mind, I have devised a list of the necessary parts of the project that need to get finished and the other things that I want to do but are not as important and are more sort-of "icing-on-the-cake" deliverables.

 Most important things to get working:

•  Surface reconstruction (in progress)
• User Interaction (in progress, almost done)
• Environment mapping and smooth shading
• Optimized running time 

Other things that would be nice (from most to least important):

• Haptic control and force feedback (arguably should go at bottom of other list)
• Improved User Interaction (e.g. rigid bodies)
• Tweaking particle dynamics / parameters
• Small GUI things (e.g. saving/loading materials, etc.)
• Index of refraction

(Whew!) Clearly quite a lot still to do, but I'm continuing to make progress and still hope to have something nice to show at the end.  Also, I think at least the environment mapping step should be relatively straightforward once I get the surface reconstruction working correctly.  I think breaking things down into little manageable pieces will be helpful at this stage at not getting overwhelmed at everything that's left.  And hopefully will soon be getting some sort of (visible) implicit surface.  And finally, here are my goals for before the beta review:

• Some form of implicit surface reconstruction
• Click-drag user interaction

In conclusion, I have officially entered crunch time.