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hello and welcome to the forums, great haze effect, and stunning depth!
and the day/night changes are nice as well ... water could be more "movin" great project! welcome abroad!

Hey thanks!
I wanted the water to be subtle after looking at many pictures of lakes from around the world. Water rendering always seems over the top to me, it's almost as if the programmer is saying "I can do this effect, therefore I must show it off to the max!" 
The waving dark patches on it are meant to imitate the non-reflecting wind effect that blows over lakes. It doesn't work as well as I wanted, but it's cheap on the pixel shader, which is always the compromise. *sigh*

Great project!

Do you want to share some details how it's done? Do you have a base mesh that gets more refined on the GPU?

Thanks for the kind words.
It uses 5 levels of Perlin for the actual vertex position and a further 12 levels for the fragment shader.
The fragment shader calculates a height for each pixel position which gives the illusion that it's really high poly count.
The colours and shading are based around a few 'if' statements with variables like height and normal values, which took a LOT of tinkering, but it was fun.
The reason back-face culling is not turned on is that each block of ground, say 128x128, is only 1 single strip with degenerate polygons at the ends of each line to carry on to the next, I also needed the polygons to have the same slant direction so I could perform the LOD transitions smoothly.
The lack of culling is not so bad, as it uses deferred rendering, which means that each pixel is only calculated once, water included.
I wanted to make a graphical roaming adventure with giant black spiders walking about the place (imagine the horrific silhouettes!), and all of it to be generated out of cylinders and cones. But it dawned on me that I don't have the years of dedication (or the money) to actually get it done. I loved doing it though, it's the sense of scale that draws me in to these fractals.

Cheers,
Dave H.

Giant black spiders, with evening light to give long shadows.
You can do it! it would be cool. Start with a cylinder and sphere mesh and hard code some simple walking animations, no skinning.

Hmm, you know I don't think I'll abandon it just yet, perhaps I could add it into a game engine like Unity or something, which already has things like sound and physics. As the landscape is generate on the CPU, it can also be deformed, at least until it gets generated again in the distance. So I could have mining creatures that carry stuff off to a lair or something weird like that. Sorting out the water will be a nightmare with that though.

I tried putting grass in using textures, and it actually speeded up the renderer because they hid the landscape from view, saving the fractal calculations. The trouble is, they looked too much like game graphics and didn't mix well with the background. It would be cool to go down a completely resource free route - including sound FX, which could be synthesised. A massive game with just an executable - very cool.
I've not looked at speedtree in any depth, I'll check it out again, thanks. I would really like a forest with all different trees, and they got to be strange Sci-Fi trees of course.
Dave.