Important Foliage Poll!

[Ginger Lord]

Seriously, which tree's do you like better.

A: 8 bit alpha blending, no rough edges but some nasty visible lines
B: Single bit alpha, looks like badgers arse but no lines.

http://img142.imageshack.us/img142/756/tree8hf.jpg (http://imageshack.us)

Both are same polies, same LoD levels (1300->100 odd) and mappers have a choice to use either, but which would you prefer.

[ceacar99]

the 8 bit alpha blending looks a hell of alot better.

while the subject of foliage is up may i suggest that most maps have lots of grass and hedges in open areas. give the infantry plenty to hide in and advance with. without them there will be alot of "marksmen" in open maps and alot of corpses......

[Lardassmonkey]

Judging from those pictures I like B best but don't take that as my final answer.

while the subject of foliage is up may i suggest that most maps have lots of grass and hedges in open areas. give the infantry plenty to hide in and advance with. without them there will be alot of "marksmen" in open maps and alot of corpses......

What like in BIA where the game gives the impression that all french farmers are mentally unstable pissheads who plant hedges in the middle of their fields for no apparent reason- no thanks....

[ceacar99]

it depends realy where you are in france. germany was so sucessfull in the parts of france that they actually fought in because much of it is damn wide open. however when you get fighting in the hedgrows..... its called the hedgrows for a reason man....

[Pierog]

i think a will look better overall. B makes it look hl1 ish...

wait, why am i replying to the public thread :D

[Ginger Lord]

The poll seems to be going one way.

[Das-W00t]

Actually, I'd really like to see both trees in a full size resolution.

[War Pig]

Is there going to be grass and rocks and whatnot, so that one can crawl through without being seen? (just goes to prove that I have no idea what the source engine is capable of..) :oops:

[crookedJ0K3R]

I have pros and cons on both sides

A: Is alot more thicker, brushier like real foilage but it has those terrible lines that might be visable up to a 'click' away from where the player is.

B: Does look HL1ish but has no lines, but it looks like someone took the spraypaint feature in MS Paint and splatted a tree trunk to death.

Overall my vote went to A, 8 bit sounds alot more "high techy" compared to single bit. Im no mapper so the whole 1100>2800 point three seven five decameters and a duece, didnt have anything for me.

A.

[b0b]

yup, something about B looks too fake but it's 3:30 AM so i can't tell you what it is exacty

[ceacar99]

Is there going to be grass and rocks and whatnot, so that one can crawl through without being seen? (just goes to prove that I have no idea what the source engine is capable of..) :oops:

the source engine is capible of having fairly uniform high grass covering large areas in 2d walls. it works fairly well but it looks old. thats option one. option 2 is make models, if you model the grass properly you can have large areas covered by the grass and people can hide in them but on large wide open maps you gotta be carefull with how much you use. and option 3 is having the earth textures themselves randomly generate grass sprites going so far out of the player. looks fantastic, kills fps at least on my machine. youve got to be REALY carefull with how dense the grass is if your going to do that. notice that dod source doesnt cover any real large area with "thick" grass.

as a mapper myself i prefer the model aproch. you set it up in clumps, or for fields you set it up to fade out over a distance. however the problem with the fade out is if your in a hilly map someone who is higher and far away can see you clearly as the grass doesnt show up on his screen. with the randomly generated grass that is allways a problem because it naturally fades out after a certain distance.

[Lardassmonkey]

however when you get fighting in the hedgrows..... its called the hedgrows for a reason man....

I take it you mean Bocage country? There may be alot of hedgerows in certain areas but the hedgrows are still used in the same layout- the hedges & banks go around the outside of the field not across the middle. Farmers don't don't add extra hedges just so soldiers can use them as cover. Thats what makes hedgerow fighting so dangerous- you have to cross areas of open ground that could be covered by an enemy well consealed within the cover around you.

In terms of the folige I said B becasue of the lines in A, the foliage looks better in A but the lines put me off- after all there's no straight lines in nature

I would definatly like to see long grass to use as cover but I hate the fact that it disappears at long distances. I'd rather have limited grass that doesn't fade than lots that does.

[readers digest]

b wins. im sure some of the lower end pc's will suffer, am i correct ?

looks good though.

e/ tbh A is the best when i look closely. though it doesnt look as sharp.

[Torgue]

A looks alot better from a distance but I am not sure how it will look when the player is standing next to it.

[Trp.Werewolf]

B looks more realistic to me.

A looks like there's moss all over the branches.

[summit]

A looks great - looks like it's simulating all the leaves it can't possibly draw. B looks like a DoD equivalent which looks quite poor ingame.

[Ginger Lord]

Jed's tweaked the 8 bit alpha one and it looks much better. For those that dont understand this 8bit stuff, basically theres 8 shades of transparency, so leaves fade in and out at the edges. Unlike 1 bit where its either transparent, or its not.

Or something.

http://img238.imageshack.us/img238/9649/newtree1tj.jpg (http://imageshack.us)

The tree leaves are 8-bit alpha but the hedges in the back are 1-bit. You can see the difference, one looks like its got some nasty JPG compresson on it, the other is smoooooth.

[Pierog]

gl, all of our foliage must be 8-bit alpha... itll look great when theres a alot of it.

[ceacar99]

i have a question(im new to this whole 8bit and whatnot thing, i may map but i still have alot i dont know), does the 8bit system require much more resources(as in more cpu time) than the 1bit? or does it only require a little more?

[Jed]

Ok. To explain it a little more...

8-bit alpha means that the texture has a 256 shades-of-grey alpha channel which gives you 256 levels of transparency. This allows you to precisely control how transparent a specific pixel in meaning we can blend the edges of leaves much more smoothly.

1-bit alpha gives you 2 levels of alpha - fully transparent or fully opaque for any pixel. This is the system HL1 used and is pretty primitive.

However, there are some technical reasons for not just doing everything 8-bit. Mainly it comes down to something called z-ordering. When drawing a scene in 3D you usually draw things furthest away first and then things closer to the viewpoint so that they appear over the top.

The problem that a lot of engines (and more often graphic cards) have with z-ordering is figuring out what polygons are behind others and getting things in the right order. Often it gets it wrong and what happens is something behind an object gets drawn in front causing a wierd inside-out effect.

In actual fact, the tree in that picture with 8-bit alpha has that problem but because of the leaf texture and the way the tree is modelled the problem camoflages itself because the textures blend into each other. It's really down to a case of what you can get away with before its noticeable.

So in short, 8-bit gives the best transparency at the cost of z-ordering problems. The real skill is in knowing how to hax your way around the problem to minimize the chance of it being seen.

[Faceman]

Seeing as you got rid of the lines in the original example, my vote goes to A instead of B.

[Sir_Winston]

I think B definatly looks more realistic

[pasive]

Ginger, why dont you decide :P i would certainly go with A, but i dont know quite how bad the lines are. B will give it a tacky look ... and ruin the country-side serenity that im sure is to be created in your maps :wink:

[Neutrino]

that new tree image is the best yet. not too sharp and still looking fresh :)

[Trp.Werewolf]

*emerges out of the fen*

Yes, it looks better.

*slinks back into the fen*

[Defpotec]

That last tree is looking better than any other tree I've seen on the Source Engine.

I think.

[Pfarrer]

Judging from this not so big picture: i vote A. In game B might look good, but I don't think so

[fess]

A looks much cleaner and 'realistic' to me.

[jmc0b]

b looks more realistic...

but i chose A cuz its more subtle.. when i look at the 2 side by side my eyes immediately look at B ... A is subtle and i dont pay attention to it.. last thing i need when im tryin to kill a german is to hem and haw over how beautiful the tree looks..

(no offense to the model/texture...just my opinion =) )

[Pierog]

b looks more realistic...

but i chose A cuz its more subtle.. when i look at the 2 side by side my eyes immediately look at B ... A is subtle and i dont pay attention to it.. last thing i need when im tryin to kill a german is to hem and haw over how beautiful the tree looks..

(no offense to the model/texture...just my opinion =) )

well technically, that might have happend where you can't stand looking at death anymore so you sit back in your trench and daze off at a tree before someone slaps you back into action

[Vandal]

I'm thinking A.

[ultranew_b]

I like B. The visible straight lines on A are too noticeable.

[Someth|ngw|cked]

I like B only because you can't see the lines but the softer alpha looks a bit nicer . . . can't you just sharper the edged of the alpha and use 8 bit alpha blending to get a result that is somewhere in the middle ?

[Jed]

I'm locking this because it's old and we've already settled on what we're using :D

[Ginger Lord]

Killjoy :P