Spring RTS Engine

I am not really sure how to make grass look more natural on spring maps..thats why i was fishing for opinion..
I think that a good step toward the right direction would be to lower it a bit and make it look thicker.
Ideally there would be sets of grass+bushes etc packages cause i think grass looking unnatural is also partially to blame for mappers making just patches of grass randomly but not other small bushes or thing around them and when u see a patch of grass just end abruptly it looks bad and the rest of the map looks flat/empty.
Probably another issue is making the texture play a part:


the feature can be the taller grass while the texture could try and mimic low grass/other greenery under the grass.

Maybe the grass itself can have its own undergrow when it is placed in the map..so you dont have to make a lot of effort to fit your map textrue to the grass color and looks.

Beherith wrote:but offers plenty of performance advantages.

Howso?

I'm not 100% sure how the current grass is actually created, geometry wise; and how the method compares with grass in modern RTS titles like CoH, WiC and MoW.

Also a way for grass to be removed from an area would be nice - no more poking through buildings or covering a scorched black weapon crater.

edit: link related http://www.gamedev.net/community/forums ... _id=395788

I've been thinking about this for awhile. My opinion is that grass should be billboarded quads oriented towards the camera on the Y axis, with a 16-texture atlas and vert animation like you've done there. 16 textures allows for a lot of variety, and different mixes in different areas of a map, and billboards would look great unless we're looking absolutely straight down. It's the technique used in most FPS games for grass, and I think it would look better and perform better than Spring's current grass does.

the main problem with the grass is the scale. a single blade of spring grass is comically huge.

really the best lookin grass is from a masked texture placed on flat 2d planes. crysis has some good examples to follow


http://www.crysis-online.com/asset/r/ne ... vd0hs7.jpg


http://lostmoya.files.wordpress.com/200 ... shot-2.jpg

ut3. despite being a shitty game, has great gfx and grass


http://www.everyjoe.comfiles/81/2007/05 ... -purdy.jpg

embiggen these to see wtf is going on, why is spring site designed for 800 pixel wide monitors?

roflcopter didnt design for a widescreen layout in his photoshop mockup, and fnordia never consulted anybody before deploying his version of the design

i agree that the grass looks strange somehow, i have an assumptions, but it may be totally wrong:
There is either grass (a lot) or no grass. It can be seen clearly that the grass is made of small patches, plastered on the map like chess fields, instead of looking like big fields that gradually go from lots of grass to none.
.. not so well explained, i guess you get me though.

edit:
an other thing is, that in real, if there is grass, you only see grass, and you wont see the ground anymore. in spring you see a few leaves(?) but the ground is still largely visible

cant we have a shader, that simulates grass moving in the wind based upon the groundtexture? This blurry wavy effect should be shadeable?
Only grass need after that would be that near the camera

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J3v_n9f71Zk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BP44VN5u38o
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EqCrKMeF ... re=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D-hOETWO ... re=related

Grassmap passed to the compiler?

Das Bruce wrote:Grassmap passed to the compiler?

What is the question?
The grassmap is the blue channel of featuremap downscaled by 1/4.
The grass shading is based on the minimap.

Peet wrote:Beherith is my favourite non-sausage hungarian thing.

I'm your favourite sausage though right?

mutton

Damn straight

Sausage reports that my join time is 13:37.
even though i see 17:37, i win (when it comes to join time).
but behe is still the best, and wins in everything else

All of this is possible only because so many others help me. Especially Kloot, smoth and artturi.

those are pictures. post screenshots or gtfo
to those of you with less than half a brain: inb4 that was a compliment

EDIT: also thanks sausage

time doesn't make sense anymore...
but i'm still 1337 :D

as for behe's screenshot, it does become obvious that grass is not proportional. Perhaps a system could be implemented to allow scaling grass according to mod/map?

what is my jointime