Do you know anything about D3D8? If not, I would recommend forgetting the island for now, and concentrating on the spinning triangle. Check http://www.vbexplorer.com/directx4vb for tutorials. Once you start to understand the API, you should be able to figure out the island from a bit of research on the net. Some keywords you might want to check out are ROAM, CLOD, and Terrain rendering. This is a fairly hot topic in the community right now, so there should be a slew of information. http://www.vterrain.org is also a good resource.

Z.

PS: If you dont know the first thing about D3D, most of the information above will mean nothing to you.