Irrlicht Engine

Terragen is the best one, I think. Its renders are photorealistic, so the heighmap should be fine;)

It is a gradient, light blue to normal blue;)

I can give you my code, but.. its not the best cloud system. Maybe you can try an ICloudSceneNode. There is some code for it in this board.

http://www.mn-solutions.net/potopia3D/Screenshot_1.png

hopefully you'll get better results...

The Sky is just a skybox, isn't it?

I tried to make some "believable", animated random clouds, but they look more like cotton...

You can only use 8 lights in your scene, it is a hardware limitation.
But in irrlicht 1.6 (SVN) there is a lightmanager with (theoretically) unlimited lights, but only up to 8 lights per object.

Do you have the right irrlicht.dll in your folder?

Oh, sweet. Thank you;)

Are you sure? This shader contains only 2 textures, one diffuse and one bump...

Yes, it is possible. I think you can use 4 textures per object; you'd have to write your own shader/material though.

Is your scene depth completely messed up?
Try and set antialiasing to false, that helped me with this problem;)

As far as I know 3ds doesn't support animation by itself, so you have to use another file format.

How did you implement the animation in your program?

Just to explain it:

if(on_light == true)
on_light = false;

If your on_light is true, you switch it to false.
In the next line you check if it is false, which it is, so you switch it back;)

if(on_light == false)
on_light = true;

Yes, Irrlicht and its features is completely dependent on its developers, but I think user should be able to suggest new features.

To topic: maybe a nice idea, but not necessarily essential for a graphics library like Irrlicht.

I'm using Vista and VC++2008 express as well, I have no problems with irrlicht and those examples. What are your problems?

May I ask you how you got those explosions like in the video?