It's a pre-splash graphic that's meant to run while the game is loading. Load time is as much as 20 seconds and I don't want a black or even just a static screen for that long.

Any chance they're texture transparencies and the problem is a UV problem (perhaps caused by your animation)?

So how do I get the plane's z in cameraspace?

I have x and y in screen coordinates, so about which z are you talking? And could you show me a snippet?

It did because the loader and the texture weren't in the same directory. I fixed it by getting the absolute path. Would it be possible to add a line identifying the fact that the problem is coming from trying to load the texture, rather than when loading the model?

I have loadModels() method whose first line is loadTextures(). But the loader fails at finding the texture even before loadTextures prints its name. What gives?

What about some logic to hide the fact that the matrix has not been cleared? Is that too convoluted? Even just a better message when throwing the exception would help. But in this particular example, you select your ship from inside a hangar. The whole thing is already short of 400k triangles, so I need all the optimization I can get inside the hangar. The game itself, naturally, has a different orientation to the hangar (since the ships have to be positioned aesthetically relative to the player). Thus my little hack.

But then it's going to cost me performance, right?