the shots look really awesome
I like the trees and that house looks cool too

Tried downloading about 4-5 times, it didn't work

Got some good advice for you though. Visually, lighting makes up 70% of the scene, you can have great textures and bad lighting the level looks bad. But with bad textures and good lighting the the level looks good.

At the moment, it seems you're using just the standard, add a bunch of tree and grass models to your level, use a multitexture terrain and a bump mapping shader for your models. You can get 5000% visual improvement just with the lighting. If you use a multitexture for your terrain, use one that has a shadow map component, and set it up so that the shadow map is really detailed and accurate. Then make sure your trees and vegetation all have their own lightmaps. You can use Ventilator's 2nd uv set plugin. It'd get really complex depending on the way you tacked this, especially if you want lots of trees and vegetation, set up properly it can be done AND have good performance. If your trees cast shadows on the ground, and if the leaves of the trees cast shadows on itself. And i fyou use something like Global illumination in giles, an even bigger improvement.

Here's a really simple level (ie not many objects), just ignore the zsorting issues on the tree leaves, can be fixed. That entire level is a mesh, so if you get the lightmap for 1 tree, then you can add 1 tree model in your level over and over again, don't rotate it, or set up a several lightmaps for different orientation and position to the sun. Same with vegetation, then once they have their lightmaps, set them up with LOD. The entire process is tedious and tough, but if you can achieve mesh lightmapping for your entire level, you'll get a HUGE visual improvement. All of the sundry things you added to the level, leaves and grass swaying, the light beams coming through the trees, are all very good things, they wont ever compare to getting good lighting, start from there and you will get something amazing

@ David:

Nice suggestion, I hope not_me can make it look like you mention it !!
Btw, I'll try uploading the instalation file from another host, maybe that's more convieniant for you.

Edit: Here's the new link David; http://www.megaupload.com/?d=6RVTZX73
Hope you don't mind reuploading it for him not_me ^^

@ not_me

The improvements you've done are good. I've seen you've added a code to make the leaves turn which makes it look really nice. But I think you should consider making the tree out of two parts, one part consisting out of the tree- tame and the second one out of the leaves separately and add the code snippet to the leaves. I mention this because you've still attached the entire code snippet to the tree and dancing tree's don't quite macth up with the realistic view you're trying to create here The cave is still under construction so I'll first let you finish that.
Keep on updating, you're making nice progress ^^

Cheers

Frazzle

i will reupload it to megauploads in a few seconds...this time ill make sure that the bird.mdl is included...
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EDIT: is there a way to cast a shadow from a model on a terrain???

not_me I'm downloading your demo right now.
And I have 2 suggestions for you first , stop creating new threads , update in one...its still the same project. And second , dunno if you already did that , but you should convert all bmp files to .tga or .pcx , big .wav to .mp3...etc. to make the demo smaller. 100MB is BIG I've had projects with more than 50 models , 5 levels + 2 or 3 terrains and it couldnt get above 60MB...
About the lighting , yes, it is possible during runtime (maby even in-game,dunno about that) but I dont know how. I've seen it in a few demos. And you mentioned that you're watching TV with your mother,about nature...thats why you're good in creating those scenes. I'm watching Andromeda , Farscape and Battlestar Galactica and I can create metal textures,SCI-FI scenes. If you wanna make good RPG's go buy D&D , Lord of the ring , Legend of Earthsea and The Beastmaster see my point ?

PS.: Everything is about the details...

Only way to do it, is by using trace instructions to determine if you'll draw a shadow on that pixel/vertice of the terrain, you then load the shadow map into 3DGS and write to it dynamically, really complex process though, Ventilator got something good working for it though in his real time lightmapping 3DGS editor. It's in beta at the moment I think.

thanks for the great comments... i havent uploaded it to mega uploads because i fell asleep ...slept my saturday away... but now i have to do it...

Got it downloaded, you're doing good, lots of things you can improve on that have pretty much all been mentioned before

The door in shot 4 needs a more "woodish" look, atm it looks like stones.
The same goes for the joists of the house, which could have some additional wood pattern.