Ben Garney's Forest Pack Status?

#101 The demo was in TGE, but the dev focus may have shifted to populate ATLAS terrains with foliage and trees.

#102 Actually the focus was shifting it away from populating TGE legacy terrains... it was hard coded to work with TGE terrain before. It now has no ties to either TGE legacy terrain or Atlas... it doesn't care what terrain you use or if there is terrain at all. It will happily put trees on a DIF or DTS (with or without the polysoup code).

The only reason the initial release will be TGEA specific was because shaders allow us to render alot more trees at a higher quality than a non-shader version. Think 200K trees vs. 20K trees.

Once the TGEA version is out we'll do the TGE port and try to bring across as much of the features and performance as we can without shaders.

#103 Sounds sweeter all the time!

#104 Harumph. All you guys and your fancy-pants Advanced engine stuff.

#105 ... >_>

#106 Thanks to Tom for all his comments, now we can see that he is closer to a release than before.

(note to myself : write down all Tom details on his implementation and go do it myself).

#107 TGEA first!?! Noooooooooooooooooooooooooooo.


Sigh. Alright, I suppose I can be patient. Just don't forget us TGE guys.

(But nice going on making it non-tree/non-terrain specific ;) )

#108 Any word on when that .plan is going up? Can't wait to see the progress.

#109 Would be very interested in any updates. Regards!

#110 Has the forest pack been shelved?

#111 I hope not. It looks to be a great asset, even if only for the TGEA.

#112 Hey fellas, it's definitely not been shelved. Things are very busy over here at the moment, but it's still in the works and we have every intention of releasing it.

#113 Where in the World is Ben Garney.

he has seemed to fallen from the earth Like Tim Gift.

I swear GG's eats these people when they get low on sales or something...
:)

#114 @Sickhead: Is there any estimated time frame? Not talking about something specific but would be good to know if its a few months away, so people can decide if its worth waiting for or if they should roll their own solution. Obviously this kit sounds great, would love to wait, but if its something that may be pushed back until next year, someone under time constraints may not be able to wait.

#115 Anyone want to take bets when this will be released? I have $20 on 2012.

#116 @Peter, I've got faith in them. I'd say 2008 the latest ;P.

When its done its done. In the meantime you might be interested in checking out the fxTreeReplicator port that James Thompson did (based off of the original fxTreeReplicator by Simon Duggan). Its pretty good. Not 200,000 trees on the screen good, but quite a bit better than even the basic fxShapeReplicator port for TGEA that's out there.

One question I do have for the guys at
@Sickhead Games: How long does it take to generate a forest using the forest pack for something like in the screenshots (around 200k trees?)? Is tree placement multithreaded?

#117 Heyas Tom

Any hints about if this tech is being canned for TGEA/TGE now that T2 have been announced ?

#118 What is T2 and where did you here about it.

#119 @ Morrie

Here

#120 I'd hope it's not cancelled, T2 is a ways away. But at this point it's already five months overdue and haven't been given any updates on its progress in three months, I can't afford to wait around any longer. Going to roll my own solution.