Hey, I was wondering if anyone can recount the history of billboard use in tree mods. Did they begin with Vality's BC mod? Did he get the idea from a previous Morrowind mod, or was that new ground that he broke? How many other billboard tree mods have there been? How do new tree mods such as Vurt's "Leafy West Gash" fit in?

I don't need this info for anything other than my own idle curiosity.

Thanks,
Greendogo

I think Qarl's Speedtree (while simple in design) was the inspiration
that gave rise to many of the billboard trees that have been released to
date; at the very least, it was the first attempt in flora format (AFAIK) .

I know there were also a lot of concepts shown on YouTube long before any releases were made, back when people were experimenting with them. Qarl's work was among them. I even believe there were some simple attempts at grass generation.

Another important player in the field was MDHmodder, altho we may be threading on dangerous grounds here, IIRC no talk of banned members?
I'm gonna go ahead and say what I came here to say even if it may be a bit of a gray area..

MDHmodder was inspired by Qarl and had a lot of great ideas on his own (borrowing ideas from older games and how they archive interesting effects). And I think Vality was inspired by both of them a great deal, I suppose I could ask him, never the less I think he was the one who finally got it through to the public.

As for the history of billboards they have been around in graphics engines since Doom, so there is a lot of "history" to cover if you want to go in-depth about them.

Billboard meshes were in daggerfall (i guess arena as well). probably been used on trees since the dawn of 3d games. I suppose that counts as some sort of inspiration. back when speedtree came out, it quickly gathered interest by developers, and is now a basically an industry standard middleware. < according to wikipedia, one of the first licensees was gamesas for oblivionin dec2002.

I meant billboards as they pertain to Morrowindian usage.

Thanks for the help guys! If I remember correctly, isn't/wasn't SWG working on something tree-ish?

SWG made a tree replacer for the Grazelands. You can find it http://planetelderscrolls.gamespy.com/View.php?view=Mods.Detail&id=7514.
Don't know if he is working on anything tree-ish at the moment.

Oldest video I could find from MDH:
http://www.youtube.com/user/MDHmodder#p/u/28/1aIxz9DbJ8w

almost four years old.

Too bad billboard leaves looks so bad with MGE in the distance (much brighter).. i played around with flipping the normals/faces, but it would still look extremely bright in the distance, if it wasnt for that i would be using it, at least for some of the trees.

I found a semi-decent work around for the MGE problem with billboards.

I used to make a darker version of my leaf textures, generated distant land, and then switch back to the original lighter texture. I worked okay, but it made installing mods realy tedious because i'd have to do all this texture swapping every time I regenerated distant land. That is why I'm so happy that Vurt has his trees!

I think someone released an esp to improve Vality's trees when used with MGE. I believe you are supposed to use one esp for MGE and a different one for morrowind.

That′s true, and MGE is a must-have . But I think that your trees are on par with (or even better than) the billboard trees, so there′s no need to be sad

There has been some bug fixes and improvements lately for Morrowind.

emissive material color and alpha support
Ghostgate is now transparent and glowing. This might have a good impact on trees too. But at least Liztail is working on distant land improvements, he may add fixes for the lighting issues. I can confirm the brightness is fixed now.

_dist flag
You can flag certain nif files with this and they will appear in distant land instead.

x_tree_01.nif
x_tree_01_dist.nif

MGE will only process x_tree_01_dist.nif, so you can make LOD versions, and fix colors and such. Morrowind will use the first.

MGE development is on fire!!!

Edit: I don't think billboarding would be that hard, in vertex shaders it can be done. I think the problem is more about little customizations and distinguishing tree and leaves. (Somebody suggested using grass mods for leaves, that could have actually worked. Now that I think, something can be done so after some certain height(If it would be possible to determine the ground height in the shader), the animation can be changed into proper leaf animations.)

Unfortunately it has a bad impact on leaves and grass. It seems like the threshold value on the Alpha is set way too low, this is making the textures much less transparent than they should be, leaves and grass that needs to have much transperancy to not look "thick" and to still retain their detail in the distance, it looks really bad in the latest MGE. Hopefully they'll fix it.

It's really nice to see that MGE is improving even further

Might try that _dist trick, nice addition!



Guitarjoe91: I used that trick too, with Vality's trees (before i was making my own trees)..

Coleman: Thanks. I'm always looking for ways to improve them even further though! i had a nice looking Weeping Willow tree that looked really good with billboard leaves..