Greetings and salutations!
For this week's screenshot, further progress on the woods surrounding the first level:
You may note that the trees look somewhat simpler than they did last week, and you would be quite correct in doing so. Let me explain:
A big part of the week just past was cycles of reworking both the trees and the undergrowth, for both aesthetic and performance reasons.
The most salient change is perhaps in the trees. Alas, I discovered that as they were, the game's performance was not to my satisfaction. (I think that I was seeing around forty-five to fifty frames per second in some views.) So, though it pained me a little to lose the more detailed trees that I previously had, I rebuilt them with simpler geometry. They're less lovely, perhaps, and I lose the effect of leaves moving aside as the player passes through them, but they do at least seem to perform well enough.
I don't think that I've yet tested performance with the grass present, or the tomb-interiors, so it's possible that further rounds of optimisation may be done at a later stage.
As for the undergrowth, I also simplified what I had there--while not, I think, a major performance problem, I recall that I did want a lower vertex-count than I had.
However, the major revision to the undergrowth was aesthetic: I simply wasn't happy with the appearance of the foreground bushes that I had. While they looked fine enough by themselves, I think that I found them to not blend well into the more distant shrubbery. So I reworked them, and I think that I like their new look.
There's one little trick that I'm quite happy with, used in both the undergrowth and tree-tops: You see, the transparency for these is thresholded, allowing me to get away with not sorting them for depth. The trick, then, is to adjust that threshold according to the fragment's distance from the viewer. The further away it is, the lower the threshold, allowing more of the image to show through. This results in leaves and bushes "solidifying" in the distance, becoming less "bitty", and perhaps a little more "painterly".
(That thresholding is at least in part, as I recall, in response to learning that the "discard" shader command and associated use of "if-statements" in shaders is perhaps a bad idea for performance.)
As shown above, I also set about building the forest floor. Dealing with the transition from leaf-litter in the foreground to the vague greenness of the background took a few attempts, but I think that what I have works.
The woodland isn't quite done yet, I intend, but once again, I feel that it's coming along!
And as is commonly the case, there were a few things done that don't seem worth mentioning here.
That then is all for this week--stay well, and thank you for reading! ^_^