:o :o :o :-X :o :o :o
AWESOME!
Very impressive.
Looks incredibly beautiful! I especially like the clouds a lot.
I recognise those cloud structures from a guy in the states called Mark something. Very nice! How hard were they to implement?
If I understand correctly from the wurm forums, they got the idea from a programmer from MS flightsimulator 2004, a lady who looks even better than the clouds I might add ;D
EDIT: Look here for a description http://www.ofb.net/~eggplant/clouds/
ohh, that’s a nice link! 
I managed to google my way to the link mentioned before:
Mark J Harris
http://www.markmark.net/clouds/
(a nice technique of light scattering cloud systems + Open source too)
[edit] nice images here: http://www.markmark.net/clouds/RTCRImages.html
Oooh, thanks for the nice comments. =D
For the clouds, I started off by implementing a system very similar to that flight simulator cloud cover thing (I even used their textures as placeholders at first, but we’re using original textures now), but quickly realized that even though it’s reasonably fast, I cannot spend that much gpu power on just the clouds.
So placed some more restrictions on it (you can only see the clouds from below, you can’t pass them) and reworked a new system. It’s basically just a simple array of 16x16 cloud sprites scattered with random offsets and rotations over the skydome, with some tricky hacking with the normals to get them lit up in a way that looks reasonably convincing.
I tried implementing scattering with some other tricks, but lost a lot of dynamic range. I’ll look into doing some fragment shader stuff for high end cards.
This system is fast enough, looks real enough, and is very flexible. I’m kinda proud of it. 
ah, that link is great, ribot. =D
I really want proper scattering in the clouds.
You are my Java programming idol :p. Wurmonline looks like a commercial game at this point (maybe not the top end commercial game but still very nice).
Hey! I REALLY like the improvements to the grass in that last pic. Much nicer.
Now you need improved trees
Wurm is looking sweet.
Ooh, thanks for the nice comments. =)
I guess I’ll keep posting screenshots.
that lighting rocks! shit me i’m having to recode my lighting shader now… git! ;D - looking very sweet top
job dude…
Ooo, nice pics. 
Incidentally, I recently had great quality results using a simplified form of horizon mapping for terrain lighting/shadowing. Might be worth looking into.
Checking out horizon maps has been on my todo list for ages.
Was it as hard to implement as I fear it will be?
Am I correct in thinking I can also use it to cull terrain?
Actually it was pretty easy to implement Finding the horizon values for any given point is pretty easy, then the resulting angles are stuffed into a texture that covers the whole terrain (at one texel per terrain tile resolution). Then a fragment shader compares this interpolated value with the current sun angle for the total light/shadow intensity.
The snag is that I’m using GLSL which makes the fragment bit dead easy to write. I’m not sure how you’d do it with older hardware.
You probably could use it to do some occulsion culling, but I’ve simplified the horizon values down to a single axis (basically the arc of the sun over the terrain). This reduces the memory use hugely but probably makes it unsuitable for culling.
Quick pic (which doesn’t really show it off well, it looks better when you can see the hill shadows slowly extending as the sun sets):http://www.orangytang.net/Junk/23-09-04.png
I know this question has probably already been asked but how do I increase the frame-rate? I’m running 800Mhz(Crap), nVidia 64MB, 256 RAM.
Very nice game and I never expected this much from Java. Very good work congragulations to all who worked on it ;D
Cheers,
Hauk
Turn off everything that can be turned off in the options, and set the rest to the lowest possible setting.
It’ll look horrible, but you should get playable fps at least.
The most important settings for you are probably disabling bumpmapped terrain, and turning down trees and tile decorations to singles/none.