Sticks and Twigs and the Forest Editor

#1 The trees in the sticks and twigs pack are not set up to use the forest wind emitter which uses vertex colours on the meshes. This is because this pack was created before the Forest editor was introduced. As far as I know the guy at RRGTS is going to update the pack but I'm not sure how far he's got, you could try asking him on his forum at http://www.reallyreallygoodthings.com/

To be honest I can't complain because it's such a huge pack of stuff at such a silly price. I have updated some of the meshes myself and I will have a go at the rest at some point but I'm a bit busy with other stuff at the moment. The forest wind effects are also much more sophisticated than individually animated trees , they have leaf flutter, branch sway and the trunk moves all in co-ordination with other nearby trees and bushes. The only disadvantage seems to be that its only practical to set it for a short radius, you can't expect to see a whole forest swaying in the breeze as far as I know. You pretty much have to be standing under the tree to see it moving. Also the forest effects don't respond well to scaled items, if you scale a tree down in size the effects become magnified in proportion.

When you place trees individually and see swaying that's because you are seeing the in-built animations on each mesh, it's probably more efficient to use the forest editor wind emitter effects.

You can find a tutorial here which explains the details and how to do it yourself:
http://www.garagegames.com/community/forums/viewthread/116091

#2 Skipper is exactly right. I purchased the sticks and twigs pack many moons ago and was bummed out that it was not compatible with Torque3D. Still, it is a great pack and has a really nice bang for the buck ratio. Also, if you look at modern engines like Crytek 3 or Unreal you will notice that not ALL of the trees are animated. This is because one tree moving is not expensive, draw call wise, but 1000s of trees animated puts a huge drain on any video hardware. I would highly recommend a mix of both animated and non-animated trees if you are doing an MMO. A good balance of the two is likely exactly what you are looking for.

#3 @Ron:
Actually, thats exactly how i did it. I placed a few trees around manually so that they can sway and flicker. then i used the Ground Cover and added in the rest of the trees. It seems to look pretty good so far and im still getting over 100FPS in general. This also allows for a far away "there is a forest over there" and when you get closer, it suddenly becomes very dense.

#4 Performance is always a concern especially with an MMO because you need to address people who have low spec hardware as well as gamers with the latest rigs. Fortunately T3D can use DX9 so it looks okay on older video hardware.

If you want to keep framerate up then you'll notice most of the stuff in the sticks and twigs pack has different LOD meshes and also billboards, so you can set it so that from a distance you are getting much better performance because less polys are being seen. Drawcalls is not such an issue since 1.1 final release also included hardware instancing which means that if the same mesh is repeated in a scene such as with the forest editor trees then it's only one drawcall.

As far as I know the forest editor trees are vertex animated so it's not like a regular animation with a character say which has bones and transformations. The most likely performance issue is the amount of shadows moving around if you are using advanced lighting.

#5 I am using advanced lighting, but I am using a mixture of turning shadows on and off. its saved me about 30-40 FPS so far with an investment cost of only about 10-20. overall, im pretty happy with it.

#6 I'm putting this question here, as it seems to be the best place for it that I can find.

I'm having trouble getting a ground cover object (grass/weeds billboard) to cast shadows, even with the 'cast shadows' box checked.


Do any of you guys know what I could do to rectify this please?

Edit: As you can see, these guys are having no trouble receiving shadows, but they aren't dropping their own. Perplexing.

#7 @Dan, I think it says "shapes cast shadows" - billboard textures (always facing the camera) don't cast shadows or else ALL the shadows would move with the player/camera.

Edit, I just checked and yes - that's how it works.

#8 Your ground cover model could be as simple as a basic 2D billboard i suppose.

#9 Steve, I'm an idiot. Seems obvious to me now though.

@Kyrah, I don't think that would work for the reason Steve just gave. If the billboard doesn't turn to face the camera then the shadow will be fine, but the grass will look terrible. It'd look like there was a mysterious shadow being cast by nothing. I'll have to use meshes and cull them appropriately.