2d trees after update?

[SgtHorton]

I downloaded update and bought new england reserve, the trees looks very 2D, was it always like that with this game?

[Reeree]

yes thats normal in games, far LODs are normally 2d, only as of recent (2weeks-ish) with unrealengine 5.1 has figured out a way to automatically generate topology to keep trees all 3d.
every single game existing to this day that has trees setup in a way where they go 2d and or 3d with no branches lowpoly (ground spike), at a distance
(more noticeable in openworld games gta, far cry, reddead ect.)

[PiRadiusz]

I think the OP means trees in player's proximity. I thought maybe I was nitpicking, but I'm glad I'm not the only one who sees that. Many trees in New England Reserve indeed look low-poly in comaprison to trees in Layton or Hirshfelden. Hell, even bushes in Medved Taiga seem to have more branches. This is really sad, because despite my love for the game, I can see that vanilla reserves from 2017 are more detailed than newer ones. I guess that's what EW calls optimization.

[SgtHorton]

Yeah i mean in very close proximity, trees in New England up close are just flat (no branches and flat sprites with leaves). Im ok with optimisations, but just give an option to make it look "rich" for someone who has good hardware.

[astreamuser]

I googled for 'new england trees' and it looks like the trees that exist in that region are not very dense. This might explain why they decided to put just few branches on them and call ti a day. But if we take into account that the leaves on those branches are essentially laying in one plane, we end up with a result that does not look appetizing at all. The reserve looked amazing on the pre-release streams, but after playing for 30 mins my reaction what just "meh".

The google images look stunning, but they haven't really been able to capture that beauty in the game.

[Gelfan_Dothea]

I had the same initial reaction (man these trees look odd). Sure they look thinned out, and the needles are low poly, but they also don't move. I thought to myself, "in a game where you're supposed to stay upwind all the time... where's the wind?"

After playing for a few hours I got used to it. More than that, I began to understand it.

1. Given the sheer size of the map and the millions of assets being rendered, there's no way they could get decent frames on average gaming PCs with high rez assets. Although I do agree that the (Crysis) option would have been appreciated.

2. Some of the wildlife is so difficult to see, and when you do see them they're half a mile away running for dear life. If the vegetation (grass, leaves, etc.) were swaying in the wind the animals would be impossible to detect. I'm convinced the static vegetation is by design.

[Geronimo]

It's probably more to do with private graphics settings and system specs.

[SgtHorton]

Originally posted by Geronimo:

It's probably more to do with private graphics settings and system specs.

Nope its like that on max settings. Surely they could have made it better looking, and hide it as an option in settings that would be off by default, but i guess they are lazy. I dont judge, im lazy too.

[astreamuser]

Originally posted by Gelfan_Dothea:

I had the same initial reaction (man these trees look odd). Sure they look thinned out, and the needles are low poly, but they also don't move. I thought to myself, "in a game where you're supposed to stay upwind all the time... where's the wind?"

After playing for a few hours I got used to it. More than that, I began to understand it.

1. Given the sheer size of the map and the millions of assets being rendered, there's no way they could get decent frames on average gaming PCs with high rez assets. Although I do agree that the (Crysis) option would have been appreciated.

2. Some of the wildlife is so difficult to see, and when you do see them they're half a mile away running for dear life. If the vegetation (grass, leaves, etc.) were swaying in the wind the animals would be impossible to detect. I'm convinced the static vegetation is by design.

I don't believe that optimization has a major role to this because the older maps look and play just fine, take the base maps as an example. The real problem here is that those red,yellow,brown, orange trees appear to be placed without rhyme or reason. Since they all look anemic this creates mental fatigue from looking at multiple foreground and background objects at the same time. Those trees also have multi colored leaves. Bottom line is that they don't really blend well with each other, leaving you with the impression that "this looks terrible". On the other hand, there's no fatigue when looking at the pine trees. It's just the design of those new assets that sucks.

As for the static vegetation, there is none of that in the game. Everything responds to the wind and moves, but it's not easily noticeable. You may think that this serves the purpose of spotting animals easier. This is partially true. One reason is optimization, the less movement the better. Another reason is that having too much foliage movement creates terrible ghosting due to the blurring effect of the TAA anti-aliasing. In other words, the image would be very noisy and the game would be literally unplayable.

[SgtHorton]

Pine trees are amazing