3D Grass

[Ver]

Will they remove the 3D grass in the next release altogether?

The grass has increased slowdown for PS users virtually across the board. The team had to release a patch already for those people that saw the game become unplayably slow because of the grass. It doesn't even look good. Unlike most 3D grass in other games, what we have going right now literally looks like cardboard cutouts because the individual patches are single flat poly with a texture and spaced too far apart (although if they changed that, it would only make it run even slower).

[Xordan]

Yes.

[Ver]

Thanks.

I thought I remember a moderator say something to that effect before, but not in an official announcement or anything.

[peeg]

Will it completely be removed or exchanged with a nice, new system? I really liked the atmosphere it added to various places to be honest

[darhark]

Maybe after they will get rid of those trees dissapearing right before our confused eyes ))
And i vote for larger trees... and will not cry if we loose 3d grass indeed (ahh is it 3d indeed? I should look on it more closely, for i was thinking it's sprites)

[Ver]

Maybe after they will get rid of those trees dissapearing right before our confused eyes ))

Maybe, but in my opinion the biggest issue with trees right now is the fact that half of them are growing out of solid concrete.

And i vote for larger trees... and will not cry if we loose 3d grass indeed (ahh is it 3d indeed? I should look on it more closely, for i was thinking it's sprites)

I'm pretty sure the 3d grass is a bunch of individual single textured polygons.

[Induane]

Its a bunch of planes spread using the foilage system.  Unfortunately the texture is not particularly good and they used a simple plus design for it so its two sets of planes.  One thing that might help is some fixing of the dynavis culler in conjunction with instamesh so we could do gras blades and many more of them without the performance hit.  I heard thebolt was working on that at some point but since he is busy with the new crystalspace rendermanager then it might be a while.  Of course the Apricot project may need to implement better grass at which point it might become a nicer system.

[ThomPhoenix]

It's a shame, I liked the grass. Would it be possible to add an option to PSSetup to enable/disable the grass, or is it world-file stuff?

[Caarrie]

it is in the world file

[Induane]

If it was made into a shader though then it could be turned on and off.  We probably won't see a grass shader though until after the new rendermanager is ready, but once that is done it should be something that people can accomplish.  Just require a grass texture as a shader variable or something.

[ThomPhoenix]

That'd be very nice. I saw that the merging of the new renderer has begun, so perhaps this would be something to attempt for 022

[Lanarel]

If only a few of the technical improvements for CS mentioned here for the Apricot project related to grass and trees get done, we will all laugh when thinking back at the grass we have now . And maybe wishing for the lag we have now? I hope not