Monofocusing on the "Three R's" and not budgeting enough for anything else is going to leave us with a population who is literate but doesn't know anything and can't figure anything out for themselves. And that latter thing is already a problem. :P

Sorry for all the short "check out this link" type entries lately. I'm busy and my thoughts are all things I can't really share.

Trying to integrate SpeedTreeRT with the HJ engine we have so far and it's giving me fits. David half-integrated the old version and a few key things changed in the new one. At this point nothing is crashing but the trees aren't rendering either. Harumph.

Despite the sound of things I'm actually pretty happy overall. Not at the moment, but as soon as I stop staring at SpeedTree or it starts working, I will be. ;)

Posted 03:32 PM CST [Link] [Archives] [Index]

It's my personal opinion that music and arts are just as important as reading, writing and math. Each subject stimulates different parts of the human mind, and it's well known that elementary school students develope and learn faster at their age then they do when they get into middle school. Unfortunatly, as that article states, a lot of schools are cutting out important art and music programs. Perhaps if more government money went into education these things wouldn't be happening.

Anyway, I was checking out some SpeedTree screenshots, and I can honestly say that I'm impressed with the overall results. They look like, well, trees. :) I wonder, though, how dynamic can you make a pre-created tree model like that? Seems like you'd be restricted to the default tree models included with the package, without a lot of room for creativity (unless you put some work into it). Could be wrong, though, as I'm not sure how immense the tree system is or how easy it is to modify.

Or maybe I'm just rambling on about things I know nothing about. :) Happens somethings. In any event, the trees look treelicious (okay that was a bad joke).

Oh wait, the website says SpeedTreeRT includes "easily modifiable" trees. That's good to hear. :)

Wow I just got the demo of SpeedTree to crash. Looks like I don't know what I'm doing.

The overall balance of things in the demo seems to be skewed toward dense, fast forests rather than really great looking individual trees. Most of them look great in clusters at medium distance without high wind, but up close some of them are a bit weak. (Then there's the palm trees which really can't handle LOD transitions well at all.)

Part of that is easily fixed in the artwork, but part requires a bit more from IDV. We want those bump-mapped, specular-mapped, light-mapped, smoothly curved, seamless trees that look utterly fantastic up close but still maintain that fantastic speed :)

Yeah I noticed that actually. I ran the "huge forest" demo and moved around a bit, investigating the trees, and keeping a close eye on my framerate. With 18,000 trees in my view (at varying degrees of quality), I averaged around 40 FPS. I noticed that palm trees really did cause a little bit more frame rate reduction up close then the other trees, but maybe thats just because of the way they were created. Overall, though, even these default trees look much better then trees in any other MMORPG I've seen.

In the tree creation program demo, I was trying to go for a certain tree look (you know, the large dead, spooky looking tree), but I couldn't quite get what I wanted. I couldn't really find a way to make the branches themselves wider then the needle thin that they default at. Maybe that's because I was using the demo version, but I'm not sure. :) Couldn't get the different colored leaves, either.

Oh well, it's a cool program to fool around with. Must be more interesting when you're actually using it to make a game. ;)

Anyway, that's probably more then enough about trees out of me. For now, anyway.

Next weeks topic, grass! Heh. ;)