Official forums for BZFlag.org

There should be patches of grass that stand up, rather than just having the flattened grass texture. Games as far back as halo1 do this - and BZFlag should catch up.

The grass has all been flattened by the tank treads, get over it...

We are not here to be realistic, after all tanks don't jump either. And BZFlag has been around a heck of a lot longer than Halo.

i see what marauder is saying, most people dont play this game because of its graphics, some of my friends think it should be better graphics, but on the other hand this game is a classic

Map makers could very easily add grass tufts of their own, but most of the time a 'more realistic' look isn't necessarily conducive to good gameplay. Games like Halo thrive on giving the player as immersive a game world as possible.

Besides, Halo has a huge corporation behind it, with professional graphic and 3D designers working on it for a full time salary - we have part time 3D modeling/game design geeks that do it for a bit of fun at the weekend.

Aww, c'mon guys! How hard could it be to make a quick .obj file with a couple blades of grass that gets tiled over the ground? It would probably take about 15 seconds to add that feature to the game, and then it could be made an effect in the "Effects" menu.

Patches welcome.

if you make an .obj file to make grass stand out, the grass would be a mesh. if you want it to cover the whole world it would one big mesh. the larger the mesh the longer it takes to connect. now with a huge grass mesh and maybe other meshes it will take a long time to join.

Ratfink wrote:Aww, c'mon guys! How hard could it be to make a quick .obj file with a couple blades of grass that gets tiled over the ground? It would probably take about 15 seconds to add that feature to the game, and then it could be made an effect in the "Effects" menu.

BZFlag doesn't use .obj files, so why would we make an .obj file?

This is really something a map author should make. There are maps that have a fake ground, such as Louman's Metropolis. You cannot assume that Z=0 is the ground.

allejo wrote:if you make an .obj file to make grass stand out, the grass would be a mesh. if you want it to cover the whole world it would one big mesh. the larger the mesh the longer it takes to connect. now with a huge grass mesh and maybe other meshes it will take a long time to join.

You can make a single mesh, create it as a define, and then use the group object to place that in different spots on the map. Stuff like this has already been done in maps.

you can do it with a lua script for 3.0

I was bored so I made a quick perl script that'll randomly distribute some tufts of grass around your map.

You'll need to open it up in a text editor and change the path to your desktop on line 6. Once you run the script, just copy in the contents of Grass_Tufts.bzw into the map you're working on.

I found around 50 tufts of grass was pretty good and didn't hurt framerate too much. At least for me. However, 1000 in a 100x100 unit map was a little laggy

Sorry, but how do you run it? I click and it comes up with my text editor. What am I supposed to do once the path has been changed?

You need to rename that attachment to Grass_Tufts.pl and run it through perl.

Thanks. You run perl through your command line, right? What exactly do you do to run it?

"perl Grass_Tufts.pl"