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Moving flora
I imagine this must have been tried before, but I can't recall seeing it, and don't have the time to install the game and look around. However, this thought/idea keeps pinballing around in my head so I figured I needed to at least post it to get it out of there

Anyways, has anyone animated flora? For example, long grass could have a trigger that when a dinosaur or player enters, the grass sways through animation. Seems grass would be simpler because I believe grass is more of a flat mesh/billboard type of object? But I feel like the same could be done with trees to simulate movement in the wind?
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Don't want to spoil too much but I'm aware of a mod going on with animated palm leaves... Had a look, is quite nice, although due to framerate you tend only to notice when not moving.
I believe the mod Draco is referring to is my Tres HD mod, which does indeed have animated flora. All I did was give the leaf textures a five-frame animation sequence, which makes it look as if the leaves are swaing in the wind. I got this idea from machf's swaying long grass, as he said. The big problem with doing this, however, is that animated objects don't appear capable of caching, which causes them to be rendered at full detail no matter how far you get from them. I have yet to come up with a solution to get around this.
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Higher detailed terrain
So I know there is the issue of being limited in the texture quality for terrain, as well as how complex the splitting of terrain vertices can be. Has anyone tried a smaller level where terrain is mostly imported meshes? Then you could use HD textures?
Closest thing I've ever seen to that, other than the terrain meshes people have used to create tunnels, is the perimeter terrain I made in the MegaJungle level. That's just a big object modelled to look like mountains which I applied a satellite jungle texture to in order to have mountains surrounding the playing area without having to use and detail Tres terrain.