Let There Be Trees!

So we've gotten a number of requests for some still shots of what this place looks like, and while we keep saying that it's nothing really impressive yet (as most of the systems haven't been integrated), I will say that the preliminary tree system looks sharp.

Some pictures are added to the gallery section of the website showing off some of the early trees, and while they are pretty low detail for the trees, correcting that is a matter of using a different set of tree textures for the leaves, and throwing a few higher detailed batch models into the directory for the procedural generator.

In the end, it's scalable and efficient, meaning that even in this basic test we're seeing 30 - 50 FPS without optimizations. Our goal is to hopefully see upwards of 90 - 100 FPS after optimizations, but we'll have to wait and see how things go.

The screenshots for the trees in the gallery were taken from the program running on my laptop, which is a 1.7ghz with 1GB RAM and an ATI Radeon XPress 1100. So you can rest assured that the browser isn't going to require a super computer to look good and run fast.

One other thing to note, the terrain batch used for the scene was a static terrain area. Like we've said, a lot of the sub systems aren't implemented yet - terrain editing is one of them.

Lots of stuff to do in the coming months, but we'll keep you posted. At least we can have vastly more trees than in Active Worlds (which is progress for us), and is just one thing checked off the list.