Woohoo!!!! It took like 10 hours of work over the last two days, but I finally managed to get maps loading in the client What you see in the screenshot is just a testing map with a bunch of things that test different features. I haven't tested the second layer yet (this is the part that makes those awesome water effects) and animated textures don't work--yet--but we're getting there!
I'm diving back into schoolwork this week, but the next step (after fixing the problems I just noted) is to do a full test with a very large map (I'm thinking 1024x1024 to start, but I want to get up to 4096x4096--this is about 4x Xenimus's map size) to see how it performs. After that, I'm going to do some work on the main menu and get players logged into the game and talking to each other. Unfortunately, for now, people are going to have to be cubes or swords or something...but that will be fixed soon enough.
Karl