I'll have to re-read my last journal entry to see what that huge list of stuff was =) I know I didn't get done even half of it yet =)
@p
Anyhow, beyond that, I played a lot with trees and got them looking a bit better. I can now combine alpha-maps in with a texture (my texture loader is starting to look like imagemagik =) so I don't have to bother too much with custom alpha textures anymore. This is a good thing.
@p
Getting the alpha maps to look right for leaves was a bit tricky, because I have a mesh that defines a leaf cluster shape, or thereabouts. So I added some functionality to shade the edges of a mesh one color, and the inside another color. This way I can do a simple alpha fade at the edges, which looks very nice. I actually think that the other thing I need to do is just make them leafier, i.e., much more leaves. This isn't very hard at all with the autogen =)
@p
Then I realized this incredibly stupid optimization that has been sitting me in the face for ages and I haven't touched. I guess it's hard to describe exactly how it comes up but in essense what I have is a bunch of meshes with materials. Then, I group them together based on material (so that I don't duplicate the material overhead) but I never actually combined the meshes into one! Why? Well, becuase I original had envisioned that like, I could have very large meshes this way and scale them uniquely and stuff and actually I think that's how it works but that's not how it's getting used. So I need to take this and unify the meshes into one. This will eliminate a fair bit of overhead, and may give me nice gains in rendering cities and trees. Silly me!
2004-12-13