Monty's projects

Hey, welcome to my projects thread. Lately I've been looking up for other things to mod than buildings and I've been experimenting a bit with vegetation. One thing that I personally think needs some eye-candy are farms, those forever empty plots of land.

I'm currently adding some different types of crops using the same type of models used for vegetation in the game. These models ensure better performance than regular 3d objects by using different techniques.

The first farm I've made is a sunflower farm.

Kansas in Cities XL

The sunflower plants are like other bushes in the game, a bunch of 2D planes that always face to the camera creating the illusion of a 3d object. Each cluster covers an area of 40 square metres and its LOD1 has 164 triangles, LOD 2 contains less plants and has 104 triangles and LOD3 is a "billboard" of 2 triangles. A billboard is that 2D tree you see when you zoom out a lot or play with low or very low settings.

I'm attaching the sunflower farm to this thread as a beta release. Since it's the first time I'm modding trees (probably its the first fully custom tree ever for CXL) I'd like to know if they work properly for everybody, or at least for most people.

Things to keep in mind:
Performance wise, they run pretty well, as any other tree the level of detail you'll see depends on your graphic settings.
The higher the "tree visibility" setting is, the further away the billboards will replace the plants.
People playing in "very low" settings or tree visibility under 30% will only see the "billboard" or 2D image of the crops, just like it happens with trees and bushes. So you'll be stuck with very ulgly crops, but you can turn the tree visibility up to take nice screenshots or if you take megascreenshots (Shift+F11), the crops will appear at full level of detail in them, they will look pretty nice, like in the pic above.
Technically you can build as many as you want without any issue. The game limits the instances of each type of tree/bush that can be rendered at the same time, so the "excess" will not be rendered, when you zoom in you reduce the instances to be rendered and they will show up normally. This may look like a bug or issue but it's a good thing, it means they won't use a lot of resources if you build "too many" farms.

Well, that's all for now. Suggestions and feedback are welcome

 

Hey, thanks for the quick response!

Look at the trees, they turn 2D at the same rate but it looks less obvious.. I could add more lods or remove the billboard completely, but I think that will reduce the performance for people playing with non very powerful machines. I'll do it anyway for testing purposes, maybe it's not that bad afterall. I could try adding an extra an horizontal billboard too.

 

btw what's your tree visibility setting value?

 

The horizontall billboard doesn't show up in the game (it looked like crap anyway) and even if I increase the view distance of lod1-2 another problem happens, you can see in the back how the game's opacity maps fail to work at long distances, so they simply become almost invisible, leaving a gap between the LOD1-2 area and the billboards. I'm afraid they have to stay like they are. It doesn't make sense to stress the engine with more geometry if you're not going to see it.

 

Yeah, that would be nice. It's possible to make those, the lavander probably would need ot be based on a bush-like model rather than blades like sunflowers or rapeseeds.

I got the horizontal planes working, it's sketchy but they do make the fields look fuller at certain angles. I also removed mipmaps and I think it looks a little better. Unfortunately there isn't much to do about it, this is how the game works. I've attached this new version 0.4. to this message.

Far away view, shadows ON.

High settings, shadow on:


High camera, high settings, shadows on:


High settings, shadow off:


Very low settings, no shadows:

 

I've added 3 new farms, wheat, corn and vineyard. You can replace the sunflower patch with this one, it also includes it.





I can't attach the file here, you can download it from this link (click on download with browser)
MEGA