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Submitted by iryan on Sat, 2015-03-28 16:55

KillerGremal wrote:
Did you try out the 'Next Object' tool form the 'Object' menu in the SE2 ?
It's possible there to set up a random number range to scale up/down, also a random rotation around the Y-axis can be enabled.
To add grass then on the map, (better) turn of all object selections, activate the terrain auto-adjustment and the placement mode generally, select any grass object from the object list (copy+paste is not supported :() - and click like the map (like a fool). Wink

This helps to place grass within seconds, nonetheless to create a dense and good looking grass cover across an entire map with this procedure may really turn out as tedious indeed.

 

Since i didn't trust may own grass planting abilities, I have created a little grass generator, just to get a visual idea how larger amounts of different grass would look like:

Actually the 3 images above show the same amount of planted grass. So a lot of grass seems to look quite impressive for a shorter camera distance, zoomed out however many grass objects won't be visual/rendered anymore with plain sight on the ground again.
And perfromance impact is quite remarkable, it may be though that the loss would be smaller with grass directly placed in SE2.

But basically I don't think generator-spawned grass is a the best appoach, it's probably just some more flexible to try out things, how the different grass types look like, how much grass objects are needed, which scale is needed, etc..
For those still interested, there's a corresponding grass mod (15kb) for the Diabloish Map for Beta 2 e(!).


A Good Tip, I wasn't aware of that functionality in the Editor. There's probably a lot of useful tricks like that that can be used in mapmapping. It's a pity that GPG never released a help file for SE2 like they did for SE1. The help menu is non-functional.

Grass like most non-important objects are defined with a variable lodfi and display cost values so they start disappearing as you zoom out. Still as you found, the performance hit with so many objects being placed in the frustrum will be pronounced. The reason I suspect that the original DS1 maps had such sparse ground cover. It also influenced map design, I wonder how many players who played DS1 back in the day will remember how bad performance was in Castle Ehb and Hiroth Castle?

DS2 has an enhanced and presumably optimized engine over DS1 but I wonder how much of the optimization is to do with the engine versus the natural advancement of cpu and video cards? More so the CPU as DS2 depends on it more than the video card.

That's why I experimented with the larger grass models as there'll be comparatively fewer of them required to be placed in a map to get a grassy look compared to the smaller grass models. Then if they start disappearing when zoomed out the look could actually be worst? If I get time I might experiment with a region like Elddim and see how it looks and performs in-game.
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