The overall look is good, the fog gives it a nice island feeling.
As for the trees, shadows are really recommended to spice up the realism like Frank indicated. You've got the choise between z-buffer shadows and stencil buffer shadows but you should make a calculated thought about using which kind of shadow. Z-buffer shadows are faster but they don't countour around objects, stencil shadows are slower but they look better due to the faqt that they contour around level geometry, models, sprites,... I would recommend using z-buffer shadows for the scene itself and stencil shadows for the main player. The grass texture, I wouldn't add anykind of bump mapping ( tangent space bump mapping / object space bump mapping) because they both have their cons and pros. Tangent space bump mapping is slower because you use more instructions to transform the light and view vectors to texture space. Object space bump mapping is faster but it behaves badly with mip mapping which is a requested use when texturing a large surface. I would just use a multitexture terrain shader. About the bloom shader, I can only confirm what Julz said about it. A water shader is always abit tricky to get right, especially at the shore but I'll judge that when I've seen a clear shot of it in one of your next updates. About the vegetation, SEED-IT is a potential solution for sure but it will cost you a small amount of cash But the amount of money you spent on it is nothing compared in comparasion with the great results you will get in return ^^ !!

For the rest I can tell you that you're on the right track about the level design, a nice progres vartan Waiting for updates

Cheers

Frazzle

You can even use static shadwos. The template terrain shader supports it in one of the rgb-channels.

Well I didn't tested it with the template version itself but I applied stencil shadows once on a model of +- 10000 polies and the fps went down from 60 to 3-4 fps ... That is my experience about it

Cheers

Frazzle

Indeed, that's what I figured out too but I never applied static shadows to any terrain yet so I will try that out soon. The disadvantage is the static look in antagonism with the dynamic shadows from the z-buffer / stencil buffer.
I might try out shadow mapping via shaders to avoid this problem

Cheers

Frazzle

Finaly!
how long have I been waiting to see you continuing
this
The screens look promising
I think it will even look better with some grass.
Hope to see more but great this far
Regards
Aztec

Thanks for the comments, they will really help.

First of all, the grass texture. The reason I chose it because its overall color fits in well with the atmosphere I'm trying to create. I also don't like it when they use textures like this:



IMO, that's not much better. About what Julz said, that is exactly why I haven't used bloom until now. I need a bloom that only blurs/brightens the bright, white parts. Sylex bloom blurs too much, Ogre bloom brightens too much, etc. What I really want is something like the HL2 HDR:

http://www.bit-tech.net/content_images/lost_coast_screens/15b.jpg

About shadows, I will NOT use stencil shadows for trees that will never move. It is unnecessary. If I use shadows they will be lightmapped onto the terrain. I have tried to use ventilators unfinished plugin, but unfortunately for some reason trying to open it brings up a list of errors.

The terrain is lightmapped for its own shadows, I could increase the contrast to make this more obvious. The same with the trees, ingame you can tell the difference between the sunny side and the dark side, but the ambient is pretty high so you can't tell from screens. Once again, I could lower the ambient of the individual trees through a material.

I think I've covered everything (that's a lot of issues for a simple terrain!). Once again, thanks for the comments.

some grass models or sprites would be nice. i recommend seed-it( if you want a headache trying to get it to work)

I think that this bloom effect would fit nice into that level, maybe a bit less but that is adjustible. If you are interested in that effect, contact me with ICQ or msn (my adresses are in my profile) and I´ll send it to you (btw, it is the sylex bloom with some tweaks ). And sorry for the cbabe^^.
And, yeah I would love to see the mystymood water in there.

Looks very good so far but maybe scale the "grass" texture a bit smaler

For shadows : faked ones with a projected decal or textuer projection is the key : used a lot in commercial engine (Far Cry etc ..)
LOD is the another big key of big titles : play Guild Wars to see how it is used obliously

Now a question that will make you want to kill me
ok i'm going to troll a little ...
here it is ....

After playing Far Cry and finding it for 10 Euros in any shop ,
why should i play your game that is and will remain far far away ,
3DGS is not Sand box Engine at all ?

Any originality ? cool new features ? (crysis will have some little originality on alines and powers)

OR perhaps you are just making the game for fun , and just to offer a game that can bring fun in that case forget my trolling