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[Bonkahe]

I'm looking towards a large seamless world (not huge, just pretty big.) and I was thinking, wouldnt speedtree be useless in a place like this, all those people running around with thousands of trees that are all very high quality, and plus im working toward trees that reproduce and die, so in my situation would speedtree still be viable?

[madz370@hotmail.com]

yeah im kinda wondering the same Im going to implement trees that you can chop down and grow anew so the world is ever changing. Only a small amount of trees will be untouchable because of their size and hardness =)

[Bonkahe]

What im probably gonna do is make some trees by hand, that way I got direct controll over the polycount, plus I dont know how to apply physics to a speed tree anyways, its gonna be interesting anyways.

[HE-Cooper]

speedtree is by far the best solution for huge games. It's why movies use them for CG rendering. Their procedural systems of LOD and leaf billboarding massively reduce overhead while still allowing for great looking and diverse assets. I'd read up on speedtree before making an decisions. the 4.2 CAD does not allow for physics based manipulation, and more than likely our implementation of 5.x won't either. Procedural physics based destruction and deformation in massive games borders on impossible to leverage. With that being said, the solution I would suggest, if you plan on having players "chop down trees" would be the same solution that most other games use: click tree, swing axe, after x swings, tree swaps in a different model. Cover it up with particle fx and voila.

[Bonkahe]

Problem is I'm looking for a more realistic style, and about the lag, all I know is when I used in udk it was extremely high poly and the lod did little to help that, and allot of the polygons I think could be done away with and still have the same result.

[madz370@hotmail.com]

yeah HE-COOPER i was thinking about something like that not too realistic but it should suffice.

[HE-Cooper]

Bon, you can make trees in Speedtree with however many Polys you like. The world is your oyster.

[Bonkahe]

Im gonna have to look through speed tree again, im at collage right now so i'll post an update when I get home and have had time to work with it some more.

[Stadi_Thompson]

if you would rather animated trees with bones and deal with two sided leaf cards, then maybe it's useless. otherwise speedtree is going to save you a ton of time.

[shadowfire]

speedtree is by far the best solution for huge games. It's why movies use them for CG rendering. Their procedural systems of LOD and leaf billboarding massively reduce overhead while still allowing for great looking and diverse assets. I'd read up on speedtree before making an decisions. the 4.2 CAD does not allow for physics based manipulation, and more than likely our implementation of 5.x won't either. Procedural physics based destruction and deformation in massive games borders on impossible to leverage. With that being said, the solution I would suggest, if you plan on having players "chop down trees" would be the same solution that most other games use: click tree, swing axe, after x swings, tree swaps in a different model. Cover it up with particle fx and voila.

Ok so you have all heard me herald CCP and Eve Online before...  So I respect them shoot me... They are an indie company that has done far more than any other indie company I know of.


But in many cases I agree with cooper here... please refer to my post on a lesson for indie developers.  Anywho start out simple... in eve when you mine a rock or salvage a ship it merely disappears... when you loot a jetcan it disappears.  In each case they eventually added a little special animation like the can pops and explodes in a  cloud... salvage is seen as being pulled aboard the ship and rocks go pop and become space dust.  This more than satisfies most people and as time goes on they make it more advanced looking and detailed.  Maybe in time you can adjust your trees to fall based on point of impact. Until then animation domination! 

Ok that was cheesy flashback to fox... anyways replace the tree after a few swings with a cut tree... replace the cut tree with a stump after some more... replace this rest oif the tree with an animated object that falls and collides with the ground and comes to a stop that can now be hafted.  Simple really.  Then worry bout modifying the trees later... long as you use a repeatable codebase for trees... IE Assets... then modifying the base assets will let you replace every asset in the game at one time that is based on that old asset.  Might have to write a spacing script like eve online did when they redid asteroids and gave them more size variations so they didnt collide but otherwise ya good to do.

[JoshHalls]

Another thing to add to the pot if it can be done (might be able to do it now, but couldn't figure it out) is to properly be able to place a speedtree via code (like gr2instance).  I can add a gr2 object fairly easily, but had with the speedtrees because they aren't gr2.  Been a few months since I was playing around with it, but I remember having issues placing it and using them in FX for the client side movement routine we used.

[TaraDesoto]

Speedtree is just a tool , like all of the other tools we have in our palette .   Its not useless , but its up to each team , to decide if its right for there specific project .   Some teams don't have people that can put out large numbers of plants and trees each week , because plants can be tricky to make for some , so for them speedtree is great .  But if you are a high level content creator that can make a lot of ( RT)  plants and trees each week , then you can more than likely also produce a lot of creature and character models as well , in this case , it comes down to a matter of time and usefulness to your project .   Do you want to spend time on trees , or do you want to make creatures instead .   If you have a totally custom look planned for your world , such as forms of exotic plants , you are most likely going to want to produce your own plants and trees , to give your world ,  your exact type of look . It depends on how picky you are as well , because you might not accept speedtree or other types of trees for your look .   Overall , speedtree is not at all useless , it is just less useful for some groups and only your team can answer that question

[Bonkahe]

I had a chance to mess with speedtree over the weekend, and though on my personal computer there seems to be some issues with exporting, I noticed that it didnt actualy have to many polygons, so what im probably going to do is make some trees (oak, birch, pine ect) then do 2 hand made models to acompany it, one stump, and one stump with the choped down tree next to it, and though I havn't had a chance to work with the hero engine yet im sure there is probably a way to make it swap between the two if there is nothing in the container (the stump will be a container.) Thanks for all the input. Were one and a half weeks into the three week waiting period, so once that is worked out I'll take a look at the programming and let yall know how it goes.