Grass texture editing

[.kju 3245]

As we all know the default ArmA texture has an heavy impact on

the FPS.

One way is to disable grass altogether, the other one would be

to modify the existing grass.

We would like to make a small case study if reducing the texture

resolution would help.

However we have no knowledge in editing textures.

So we want to ask you nicely to help us out there.

Texture can be found here:

Path: ArmA\addons\plants\data

Filename: trava1_trava2_ca.paa

Thanks! Your help is very much appreciated!

[Planck 1]

There is nothing that uses this texture in ArmA, apart from grass_general_shader.p3d and this model is not used.

Textures and models used by the grass clutters on the ArmA islands Sara and Desert are:

clutter_grass_desert_ca.paa - clutter_grass_desert.p3d

clutter_grass_long_ca.paa - clutter_grass_general.p3d

clutter_grass_longer_ca.paa - clutter_grass_long.p3d

Planck

[cj525 5]

Another area to consider which would impact greatly on performance is the amount of polys/face counts each plant/tree etc. use. Our Mod group is making jungle islands for AA and we used the individual plants to populate the island....not a good idea but it was an bench mark to improve from. We looked at the poly counts of the trees /plants and found them to very around the 10000 face count (for trees roughly), compared to ofp this is extremely high, we where working with max face counts for jungle sections in ofp of around 50x50 sections LOD 0.5 = 5000 polys. Of course the computers of today can handle alot more hence the higher face count but if you want to squeeze some better FPS rates changing the texture and reducing the face count would definitly be the way to go.

Okay after that ramble what you might consider is making your own grass patches and linking them to a ground texture via the config. Or you can swap out grass textures the same way you swap out unit textures (this would be the fastest way to run performance tests...... hmmm I guess this would have been what you where originally asking.

[.kju 3245]

Thanks a bunch Planck and cj525!

With Kegety's lowplants v1.1 release I guess

we won't continue our project though.

cj525 the alpha textures are a very serious problems in the ArmA

engine as those cannot be reduced by the engine.

Maruk made a statement about it some time ago.

Better check his explanation yourself.