It *must* look good -- I thought those were real-time rendered 3D models until you said otherwise. :P

You'll need to find some way to make the trees look like they're actually attached to the terrain ... when I first look at it, it looks like they're just floating there (could just be me though). Other than that, it looks neat, I like the style you're going with.

you are right, a built-in 'sprigs of grass' around the base of most things should do the trick I think?

I think if the terrain matched the sprites in vibrance and style (or vice versa), it would really go a long way to make it look more consistant and seamless. I also agree with the grass idea. The hard black outline of the sprites' edge also strongly separates them from the terrain.

It looks good to me, but I keep thinking: If you were using an already made engine like Irrlicht or OGRE(which can easily do 3D and 2D as well) you would have solved this and many more problems already, and you would be writing the game right now, not a terrain rendering library. It's you decision though, so good luck :) I like the style of it.

In a way you are right.

However while is may seem like a waste of time, I think it is very important. As a developer I would not feel satisfied taking an existing game engine and using it. Unlike the Flare engine, the S3 Engine is being designed as the engine we will use for a long time. I donot really 'enjoy' writing game engines (though some parts are enjoyable) however for us it is a neccicary evil that we develop our games with our own engine. Our goal is to also licence this engine when it is completed (in addition to game creation) since unlike Flare it will be entirely data-driven and very easy to use by comparison.

To sum it up, we develop game engines because it is Satisfying, Impressive and embodies the DIY spirit.

Could we get a game out sooner using a pre-built engine? maybe, assuming it did all of what we needed, but I got into this industry to make games and to me, that means the engine too.

Thankfully I have come to realize that libraries are helpful; to date we are using:

The C++ Standard Library [containers and algorithms]
TinyXML [xml reading]
Lua [scripting]
Boost [smart pointers, serialization]

and there will likely be many more to come.