Baal wrote:
Ah, 8600. There's the fps drop. But that's pretty good for W:ET (regarding that map with all the grass on it). I bet 50-60fps is reachable with new vid cards and similar CPU ghz.
Well, I'll do my best to make it run as smooth as possible on my PC without reducing the quality.
I didn't do much work on the grass. I should tilt the planes so they don't dissapear when viewed from above, add some variety to the height, make sure it gets affected by distance fog, maybe make it higher res (currently it's 256x256), add more grass blades per texture and make them thicker so mipmapping doesn't screw it up completely. Then there's the LOD models creation and custom texture(s) too...
In the meantime, here are some new screenies (click on them for a bigger image):
The trees are ~400 polys, at this time they don't affect the FPS so I'm not planning to create lower poly versions for LOD. BTW, when I say trees, I mean one tree copy-pasted a few dozen times. :)
Due to their size, they look better from a distance but I need to make them affected by fog as well.
The trees are created with a great tool called
Tree[d] and I've also "borrowed" it's textures.
Then they are imported in Blender (if you need to do some retouching) and exported to .ase.
EDIT:
A quick (and dirty) update:
I've modified the transparent shaders, they're a lot cleaner now and affected by fog, finally. The grass isn't mipmapped anymore so it's visible across the map.
There is a performance boost of 10 - 15 FPS' which is a big deal considering it was running @20 FPS in the last one.
Turning of AA (4x) adds another 10FPS but like I said earlier, I won't be relying on crippling the graphics quality.
As you can see, I forgot about the trunk, it still isn't affected by fog. :P
You might argue that the colors look washed out now but that's because of the agressive fog which comes with the used skyshader so here's how it looks without it (something in the middle would work nice):