I had a play around with bilboards (basic 2d object). As you can see, I littered the grass area with trees. It’s fairly handy, because they rotate to follow the camera, thus giving the illusion they are somewhat 3d. Even though they are infact a flat image. Whilst cheap, it’s effective. It also means you can litter your landscape with them and not have to worry about upping your polly count.I wrote a quick algorithm that randomly places them on the gras around the building. Well, mostly on th grass :) Next up I began experimenting with adding an actual landscape. TrueVision makes it a snap, you can load in height information from the greyscale of an image, load in the texture you want to use for the landscape and then start tweaking. You can also see, I have added an atmosphere (anothe thing easily supported by TrueVision). I’ve yet to get to it, but you can add fog, clouds, rain, sun, water etc…Oh look, you can see my trees around the grassy bit :pOne cool thing of note is a simple addition to the camera. You can get the height of the terrain, and factor that in when you update the camera, thus having the camera follow you as you walk up and down slopes. This has the effect of making it feel like you are actually navigating the terrain, and not just floating.When I have finished playing around with some of the aforementioned terrain additions, I will consider moving onto lights and shadows and get back to fixing up my collision handling and bounds.This is just a testbed whilst I’m learning what TrueVision has to offer (and the latest and greatest 6.5 is truly amazing with pixel shader 3.0 support). Who knows, maybe I’ll turn it into something more fun!Tech Tags: