Reality Factory

If anyone has worked terrain levels with farcry1 editor or other easy to use editor,may have noticed that there are tools that paints by raidius lists of objects like foliage,rocks and trees on the terain and can place them with a multiplier-one click places 10 trees -for instance.

Each terrain vegetation object aligns its rotation to the terrain and then static lightmaps (shading) are precalculated on them (and the terrain).
One other difference is that grasses will not be bitmaps,but actors with transparency,and are replaced by bitmaps at a specific distance.

I dont ask for crytec tech,but something simple between the foliage (sprites) and the fliptree (actors).

First,several actor slots like:

actor1 = 3rocks,
actor2 = 3Trees
actor3 = grass1
actor4 = grass2
actor5 = grass3
actor6 = Bushes1
actor7 = mushrooms1
etc.

Each Vegetation actor slot would have the following flags and settings:

1.Rotation flag for each actor slot to align to the terrain (later when the physics collision allows this).

2.Density.

3.Spread radius (like the foliage).

4.Range:after that distance,the actor is replaced with a bitmap (that always rotates to the camera view).

5.UseAlphaFadeIn when the actor starts to get in rendering range.(no normal mapped actors because they dont have alpha yet).

6.UseAlphaFadeOut for the sprite bitmaps that replaced the actor.

7.Min and Max distance for rendering the Shadow bitmap.

8.AmbientColor,ShadowMapName,Scale-etc

I know the entity window height would increase,unless there are + - buttons for expanding the attributes for each actor slot.
This entity would be easy to use,making the terrains much prettier.
Think that untill now you have to place hundreds of static entities to fill the terrain.
Farclip plane will keep the framerate.

Nice idea, i played with the idea too, it would be very cool once the d3d9 driver is (finally? ) ready. It could even be possible that you don't select a bitmap, but fade out the actor at a certain distance and at a certain distance it will not be rendered anymore.

Sprites wont match the actor lightning anyway and will look like they are from another scene,whether it is a tree or grasses.
So,if you have made Lod's for the vegetation,that will do.
The alpha fade in/out is nice.

There should also be different types of how the objects are aranged, like 'Foliage' for the way the foliage entity does it (randomly), or 'Field' which works more like an array of actors (they are not arranged randomly, usefull for thinghs like fields/corn, i've seen something like this in other games already), then 'Groups' (tries to put the actors together in groups), 'Mushrooms' (puts the actors in the near of a type of object, like trees, therefore the name 'Mushrooms' because they stick to the trees), and maybe 'Lightdependant' (which checks the lightmap on the ground to determine where to place the actors)

It would spread actors mainly on staticmesh terrain,as this is the only smooth type with face collision.
Some bigger stones might need to be collision =true.
I would first use it for various kinds of rubbish on statimesh dungeons -old halls can be filled with skeletons of monsters,skulls,broken rusted weapons,many stone fragments,arrows,old scrolls,old broken chests,used potions etc.
All these with ,to gain speed.
Until then,we can use several dovens SEPs with nocollision and gravity true.