A little earlier than expected, but here’s that screenshot that I promised last night.

This was a freshly generated world, complete with forests.  From this vantage point, we could see about 2,000 trees.  That seemed a little low to me, so I activated one of the regions over on the right edge of the map, and filled it completely with forest, which brings the number up closer to 3,000 trees.  The performance bar at the bottom of the screen (visible slightly overlapping with the “Roads” tab) shows that this hasn’t notably affected rendering performance, even in this debugging build.  Which is pretty awesome news.

Now, in practice, I probably wouldn’t actually be rendering the trees like this from this point of view;  those are all full-details trees, drawn exactly the same as if you were looking at them from ground level.  In practice, I probably don’t need to draw their trunks at all, from this view;  they’re entirely obscured by their foliage!  And I could probably get away with using a much simpler and cheaper model for the foliage, when viewed from this far away; each tree is only a few pixels in size, after all.  And to be honest, these tree models are absurdly expensive in the first place, even when viewed close-up, particularly given how primitive they look.  (I expect that the eventual, nicer tree models will probably have half as many triangles as these ones, and could each be drawn using a single material, whereas these are currently using two materials each)

By and large, I’m pretty happy with how this is working out.  For the rest of today, I’ll be moving monsters and PCs over to render using the instancing system, and then I should hopefully have RenderTech builds for people to try out sometime tomorrow.