My current "WIP"

[technomage]

I got 70+ FPS on my Athlon 3800+ with a Ge Force 7800 GT and 1 Gig of Ram, it goes up to 190 on just water.

I would love to see the code for this, Dirk fancy giving me a hand with InfiniteSpace-online My planets will need to have plants and trees on them

[Huehnerschaender]

i will add some inline documentation and then i'll upload it with source.

after that i'll start to add my ideas i have in mind.

you might be glad to hear that the "field of grass" class is nearly finished and will be included.

expect the upload this weekend.

greetings,
dirk

[Huehnerschaender]

"GrassField" class is finished.

Below are 2 screenshots, where you take a look at the visuals using those grassfields.

I am quite satisfied 22 FPS with more than 60000 plants on the landscape...

[WILL]

Hey tried it sometime earlier this week and forgot to post my own results.

I got it bouncing back and forthe between 11 and 16 FPS *shrug*

I consider my system pretty decent by all standards considered.

Toshiba Satellite M70
Celeron M 1.6 GHz w/ 512MB RAM
ATI Radeon XPRESS 200M
Windows XP

[czar]

The grass looks way cool.

[chronozphere]

The grass looks way cool.

I totally agree It looks very realistic

I'm anxious to see the source :razz:

BTW: Did you made the textures yourself?? i really like to know how you made'em.. or where you downloaded them.

[Huehnerschaender]

I am currently including a "zoning" function in the grassfields, which will hopefully gain some more FPS even with very big grassfields (eg you may want to have a whole grassy level, so you assign a grassfield which covers the whole level, but you definetely don't want to cycle through each grass plant every frame).

It's not completely finished yet. I need to sort the textures within the fields for Direct3D rendering purposes (otherwise it slows down the whole thing dramatically).

When this is included I will upload. Unfortunately today I have some other things to do, so don't be angry if it will last until tomorrow.

Concerning the textures. They are from various sources. I made some myself (trees, some plants, smoke, explosions), the ground is from Nocturne Texture Pack (free), the water is from a free texture pack. The background is from a quick google panorama search, and one or two plants are ripped off from Gothic 3. So not everything is fully legal and I cannot just say "Do with it what you like". It's just for a showcase. But if you are interested in special textures, then let me know and I can tell you they are free, from me or whatever. If they are my creation you can use them as you want of course.

I want at least exchange the textures ripped from Gothic 3, because I don't feel good using them. So expect the wheat and the grass changing soon. I just used them to have a placeholder during developement.

The way I do "realistic looking" textures is the following.
Go outside with you Digicam, make photos of what you need (a single plant, a branch from a tree, a wall, whatever). Go home, make the texture seamless if you need to cover it a tiled area (eg floor) or mask the Alpha channel to let only the wanted parts be visible.

You just need to know how to use your photo-editing-software. Thats all.

Greetings,
Dirk

[NecroDOME]

I realy like the grass you created!!! Nice work!
A little queation about makeing texture seamless: how you do that with fotoshop?

[Huehnerschaender]

The trick I use is very good for textures like grass, sand etc... everything without a special muster.

For example:

- Make a photo of pebbles from top view (spread your feet and make it and take care no one else is watching you *lol*).
- cut off a quadratic area you want to use as a texture.
- tile the image in the middle vertically
- move the left part to the right and the right part to the left. This way the texture is seamless right and left, but looks crappy in the middle.
- now use the clone tool to erase the bad look in the middle.
- After that cut off the image horizontally.
- Move top part to bottom and bottom part to top.
- Use clone tool to erase the dirty line in the middle

Thats it in short words... Just need some practice and then it's very easy.

[Traveler]

Alternatively, look up the offset filter and enter values 1/2 the size of your image. Then remove the seem like how Dirk says and you're set, too.

In regards to the screenshots, they look mighty nice! Can't wait for the next version to appear.