Thread: 2.0 Grass: please change!

Originally Posted by Mihana

I didn't care to go through all of this but something I wonder if anyone's considered... They're running this on lower settings most likely, maybe even a laptop. It's very well possible the grass here is just a low-res textured version. They're very well aware one of the selling points of this game is the graphics, why would they deliver such a thing like this without considering that first? Seeing as these are just supposed to be "screenshots" of the game's current phase and to show off what they've worked on so far I'm doubtful they'd intend to leave it like that.

Sadly, no they aren't "low settings". The grass/plants are actually just the same ones we have in the game now, just there's a lot more of them and for some reason they're scattered around in singles instead of bunched together in little patches like what we have now, adding to their eyesoreness. The reason it's not a "setting" is that if you look at it, it is a 2D bitmap, sometimes with another 2D bitmap perpendicular to it. So it's in xyz space but it's a 2D bitmap. There are no "settings" to improve the look of this bitmap. I think I'm correct in identifying it as a bitmap, but someone correct me if I'm wrong. It doesn't appear to be a texture, which could be sampled higher if it was enabled.

As for why they would deliver that it looking like that.. I can only speculate that as far as they identified the tradeoffs this was the best they could do at the time. I'm inferring that 3D grass/plants were out of the question.

Also to anyone that thinks this is going to be improved, here's why that's not going to happen. It's an art asset that's been in the game from the start. The art asset is final. If it was going to be a higher quality bitmap it would already be. If anything the "bitmap crossings" are less dense now than in 1.0. So it's not going to improve, it's always going to look that way. Unless they change it from xyz space to an xz point like in Xenoblade.

Also since they are fixed in xyz space they don't animate or move in the wind at all. An xz point bitmap that's camera oriented can animate smoothly and minimize the "flat" look, adding a lot of flair.

Xenoblade grass/plants don't look amazingly good, but I mean if they are really going to look that horrible in 2.0 like this footage shows I think they should really consider switching how they display these 2D bitmaps.