[TESTMAP] Density Forest (with custom model)

[SniperGoth]

This is a map made for testing a billboard tree model i made from one of the vegetation assets from game.
There's around 850 or so models of it on the map, but there doesn't seem to be too much performance loss, since it's basically a plane with a texture to it .
This will be very handy for people that wish to make Huuge forest landscapes on the game with not much performance issues.

[qreeves]

Not a bad idea. I wonder if we can improve the performance even further by have a proper billboard entity.

[SniperGoth]

[Chasester]

Its called impostering. Technically you can do a trick where you have to ents sharing the same position. One is a mapmodel of the mesh abd the other of a bilboard [i would use a 16 side non camera oriented billboard]. Then attach a buildboard shader that gets the camera position and if ots far enough away builds the mesh. If not it renders nothing. And the opposiy for the model. Where of the camera is close enough it renders the mesh. If not it ignores it. This can be done a variety of ways. But that be the basic idea. If you want to mod the source you could add a mdl impister that links to a mesh to a class model type. So each model class would essentuially allow fkr 2 (or more) meshes and then a variable for at what distance to hot swap them (best to use a fade tbh). Then during render mapmodel->rendermodel before you send the batch model to the batcher to be culled you could switch which model to render based on dist from camera one. This could be done in maybe 500 lns of code and really wouldnt be hard to impliment. Tho for ever model that doesnt use imposters you are wasting 4 (or 8) bytes. But in theory you would want this for all non animated models.