foliage help

[thelusiv]

Since Joe's last post he changed the way they're done and they look very good now. I need to update the shadow graphics themselves a bit more but after that I think the tree shadows are more or less done.The biggest remaining problem I see with the tree system is this:When trees are placed on the terrain, it isn't taken into account where other trees are around them. So, some trees can end up stuck under others. When they're really thick like this the framerate drops quickly. I think the best way to fix this would be to make the game aware of the trees' radii, maybe just have another text file in runtime/data/objects/ called trees.txt that has the width of each tree. This text file could be something like this:<pre># tree 0rad 2.0# tree 1rad 2.0# tree 2rad 4.0# tree 3rad 10.0# tree 4rad 3.0</pre>So each tree would have a radius, and that way the trees could be made to avoid each other and not be too clumpy, even if they are at the highest density.One more idea for the trees: they look a little funny sometimes when the trees are mixed together because usually, trees tend to group together somewhat. It would be nice to have some way to control which types of trees go where so that we could have a clump of pines, then some oaks, blah blah blah.Oh yeah one other thing: it would be nice if the shadows of the trees moved/grew a little along with the weather system, so that as the sun sets the shadows get longer or move.