Hello
I've just downloaded the uwas_grass addon and its brilliant. The grass is really convincing and the sample mission with the dynamic grass generator is REALLY fun - it actually creates new grass objects around you as you walk, giving the illusion of walking through endless fields of waving grain.
Unfortunately, there are a few problems with this approach - dynamic grass appears on any flat surface (including paved roads, bare rock and beaches), and although I haven't played it I'm guessing that the dynamic generator would slow down MP play, what with all that object creating and moving going on.
I'm fairly new to the addon biz, but I've been looking at a lot of configs lately and just had an idea - why doesn't someone just make a grass "forest" object ?
Most players probably don't see it but since I play on a laptop I've noticed that when Woods objects are viewed from a distance the LOD routine turns them into flat plates on sticks. This looks pretty crappy, especially when the view switches between rendered trees and flat graphic. But for grass this would be perfect !
Imagine - a low foliage with (say) three LOD. High res poly rendered grass, low res poly grass and a flat "speckled" grass overlay, set to (say) 0.5m height. The players would see the grass up close, becoming more diffuse as the distance increased. And at very long range it would act simply as a form of low cover - crouch and become less visible, go prone and disappear !
The uwas_grass addon has a number of different grass textures and heights - these could be used as the basis for three new "forest" objects - low scattered grass, medium thicker grass and tall impenetrable grass.
The advantage of making a forest object would be ease of use in map design (a forest object covers a much biger area than a single clump of grass), the aforementioned "cover" effect at range and the ability to easily deform the object to conform to terrain (just like existing forests). It would also keep the object count down on a big map.
Does anyone knowhow to create new forest objects ? I have all the tools (Visitor2, the master config etc), I just need to know where to start.
Any help greatly appreciated !
Roni
Topic: A grass "forest" (Read 1115 times)