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"All about the green stuff."

Yup, that's right. The green stuff - grass and trees etc. Why can't developers get it to look right? With all the power of todays consoles, why do trees still look like they've been drawn by a blind 4 yr old?

Christ, a lolipop stick with a green circle on the top would look more realistic than the crap we have to put up with in games.

I've just finished playing a bit of GT3. The worst offender as far as I'm concerned. Yes, the cars look great, the sky looks great, but the grass looks crap. The trees in the distance look ok, but when some of them are closer to the track, especially in rally courses, they just don't look as good as the rest of the game.

Another offender is Operation Flashpoint. I saw it running round my mates over the weekend. Ok, his PC isn't fantastically fast, it's only a 700 P3, but the vegetation was atrocious! Trees just seemed to be two bits of green crossed over each other. So if you lokked down from the top, you'd just see a '+'. They didn't have any dimension at all.

Why is this?

In an age when cars look like cars, people look like people and we have all this power in the machine, why does a bush still look like a pile of green dog poo?

Do the developers just give up when it comes to this stuff? Have the done the majority of the game, and just say "It's only a tree, no one will notice."?

WELL, I BLOODY NOTICED! HA!

Wookiee, exactly. In Operation Flashpoint the vegetation plays such a large part of the scenery, you would have thought that the developers would spend more time on it.

WÚÛkiee M¯nßÜÄR wrote:
A shame, because it's a brilliant (if very hard) game.

It's top, and yes the vegetation does look a bit iffy, but with the size of the area it's a sacrifice I'm prepared to make.

I stole a Hind and flew for almost 20 minutes in a straight line.
Now THAT is a big map.

(did I mention I completed the campaign game?)

Yes the trees in Zelda:OoT where pretty good.
And the trees in Sonic Adventure 2 also.

Look at the trees in Zelda. They actually look very good.

:D

Sorry, just giving a good example of trees.

Fairly typical of trying to emulate organic items in a digital world - nothing developerd so far is particularly good at it.

Oh, and it's not your friends PC with Operation Flashpoint, YH - it looks bad on my P4 1.7GHz with GeForce3 car, too. A shame, because it's a brilliant (if very hard) game.

Like in hidden and dangerous, this game has a lot of trees in it so why the hell don't the producers make decent trees!!!

They are like 4 bits of green paper stuck together.

Tut tut tut.

So in the middle of a tense race, you screech around a long corner...

"Oh look, the grass is just inches away. Let's have a close look and admire how crap it is!"

;-D

As for grass, it'll come right in due time.

Pikmin's grass looks great (although that's not really a fair comparison as Pikmin's grass is as big as trees...)

Of course you do, when you clip the apex and ride the curb, the car should be mere millimeters from the grass, to get the perfect line around the corner and carry maximum speed on exit.


Unless you're not that good, of course....

:-)

Ah, but the skilled driver will never go near enough to the scenery off the track to see it in much detail, surely? ;)

In Operation Flashpoint, trees make up a LARGE part of the landscape, as you're running through fields etc.

Also, it's weird on GT3 when the cars and track are all done ver nicely, but you look a few cm to one side, where the grass verge is, and it looks poo.