thanks for the helpful reply. i am not going to stream. they'll just have to wait while the applet downloads with the 40M of data inside the zip, then it will be fast after that while they are using it, or so i tell myself
And the software renderer is no prob. The terrain demo runs at 7 fps on my old 200mhz laptop, which is fine for this purpose. So i guess it will work with the MS VM and Sun plugin, blah blah? do you know if not using BufferedImage in 1.1 hurts performance terribly? and do you cull stuff in the line of sight but far away? if so i will make the background mist colored and it will be fine otherwise i might have a prob since there is alot of terrain in any direction.