Diablo Trees In Game.

I'm going to leave trees and move on with some other stuff for a while.
I think the trees look pretty good and performance is much better than when i was using individual tree sprites.

I'm still conflicted about how to handle alpha in the game. Here's a shot of the trees with clip alpha:

Clip alpha is basically either/or alpha. Either it's 100% transparent or it's not. It's very fast to render, but it gives pretty horrible edges.

Another option is to use alpha sort. This is similar to the alpha blend I use for the infantry sprites (grayscale alpha) but it works to sort the individual polys of the mesh to make sure they get rendered in the right order.

Performance is slightly slower than with clip alpha. But the end result looks much, much nicer. Again this may be something I make a part of the graphics settings, as it would be possible to load different trees from file, some with alpha sort and others with alpha clip and lower resolution.

Comments

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