You can stop hoping lostclimate. The project is not dead, I'm working on it during my spare time. New shots to be posted soon showing the first rebel outpost.

nice you are still working on it,
the project looked too good already to be given up.

Yeah great news
Really even with only what you have in that level making more rocks perhaps you could make an entire world already !
(perhaps the same character with different outitfits to make ennemies and here you go !)

What I've been doing is:
I remade the same level 8 times bigger then the original one.
The Canyon itself has been remodeled with new more realistic rocks.
And next on the list is the outpost to be modeled and textured.

I've been playing Skyrim lately and working on the project as well.

About Skyrim I must say the engine renderer has been improved a lot, the gameplay as well. It is indeed a masterpiece. About the graphics I was expecting a little bit more in terms of quality (in truth I wasn't expecting my laptop to be able to run it).

The polys are a lot, the renderer is great.

The Armors and weapons are a lot more detailed compared to Oblivion, nothing I wouldn't be able to do but an unbelievable amount of work indeed, which makes it impossible for an indie developer to reach.

That's normal.

Speaking of Wasteland instead, I've been studing the complexity of Skyrim landscapes. Something I'm sure Gamestudio just can't handle. I'm running this level now in wasteland which has about 650k polys in it (of course with lods so it gets a lot lower on screen). But a 500 nexus is already too small to handle the whole level.
Plus Shade-C completely kills the framerate so I have to optimize here and there.. fake as much as possible.. it's tiresome I tell you.

Now I find myself in the middle of a crysis in terms of style to adapt onto the level itself, I'm trying to find a decent combination of rocks, sand and vegetation.

As you can see from the screenshots above there's a lot of free space between rocks and grass which I don't really like, I'm trying to find a way to fill it up with some trees and brambles.. not quite there yet.

Anyway, I'll go on modeling and hopefully I'll post a new video on youtube soon

One minor thing in Wasteland level:
I could not find out for a few minutes, what is strange with the rails... everything is really nice, I like it.
But finally realized that the breakstone base is missing. I know it's not important, only my stupidity.
I have similar feelings in case of a lot of games, and usually never can find out, what was it...

It actually looks like this isn't the end of the track, since its just a gap between the second half. I would say that either thieves stole it, or nature did its job.

very nice observation.. i'll fix it! thanks for the tip

dof is exaggerated. normally, if the camera's focus is more than, say, 50-100 meters away, more distant objects are only slightly blurred. besides, on your shots there's a distinct division between non-blurred, blurred and object in-between. i'm not sure if you can completely overcome this using Shade-C's built-in dof, but some tweaking would definately improve the overal look of the shots.

looks like the sun is hidden in the clouds(pale colours, no shadows) - it means that the difference between materials' ambient and diffuse colours should be a lot smaller than now.

on the other hand, the colors are excellent and fit the scene and mood really well.

overall impression - good, but it feels a bit empty(which is ok for a desert i suppose )

Perhaps a little empty, but if you would put some other rocks it could od it !

Skyrim rocks is also a trick, they use good LOD also, and like Oblivion, in a town you'll see that everything around you are detailled, but the level is empty some meters after (even by adjusting some good distance).
They have a good fading LOD, the ojbjects appera with a smooth alpha transition as you come near (to be less heavy in terms of polygons to render ) : and you even notice nothing if you are playing and don't concentrate to remake it
You could make a lot more general big rocks, than with LOD or
Alpha fading object add more rocks or details ?

Or perhaps you can adopt Borderlands style, with interconnected levels ?

Anyway, i find this level looks great in terms of colours, ambient lightening and atmosphere