Trees

World progress:
* Sea: Mostly complete. Fresnel texture is slightly repetitive; will seek to add a second layer to diminish repetition. There is a visual artifact at certain camera angles that I must remove, and I await the arrival of custom rear clipping planes so I can make the reflections more accurate.
* Sky: Complete. Sky detail can be adjusted, at minimum using a skybox. I don't like the coverage given by the 3d cloud layers, though. I'll have to look more into that functionality.
* Land: Present, but slow. The multipass shader is much responsible for this; I intend to investigate texture-atlas painting to replace my current texture-alpha-splatting approach.
* Camera: Almost complete. I am not happy with the zoom-to-angle ratios; I will try to correct that tonight.


Trees.
I have completed twenty-three trees for use in Dawn of Civilization, as follows:
5 pine trees of various types, including the Mediterranean cypress.
4 palm trees. These will be supplemented by different leaf variations.
9 deciduous trees. Including Oak, Aspen, and Birch as recognizably different variations, these should make for quite interesting forests.
4 "jungle" trees. I can't remember the scientific name for trees of this type; they form the canopy of, say, the Amazon Rain Forest, and are the tallest trees in my collection.
1 Acacia. There's just one because, honestly, there's not much variation in shape!

Beyond this, there will be at least 2 palm tree texture variations, 3 pine tree texture variations, and 5 deciduous/jungle texture variations.
Additionally, all trees are rotated and scaled randomly. The sum result should be quite enough foliage to cover all the worlds in a nice green layer.


Additional "unmoving" objects to place in the game world, including:
* 5-8 cacti and similar desert plants
* 3-5 bushes
* 5-8 large rocks
* 2+ fallen logs (to add visual variety to forests)
* 3+ termite mounds (to spruce up the deserts and savanna.
* 2-4 bunches of river reeds
* 2-4 groups of flowers.

I may have these smaller objects use their own, shorter-ranged paged-geometry system so as to inflict less FPS damage.



I think that forestation may well be the single greatest cause of FPS problems in the game... especially with the "mega-forests" my map-generator currently puts out. I don't really want to lose the mega-forests, though; I shall have to think of a compromise. Maybe cut the big forests into several smaller groups...