Quote: "As the player moves, I need to create flora around the player based on what objects are in the terrain etc... The game has dynamically created and destroyed objects and I don't want grass in the middle of a road and such.
Sooo. What I did was do collision raycasts to find ground position and to make sure other objects were'nt in the way. While the player moves flora is destroyed behind and created in front of.. However this is all just a bit too slow."
Like myself, I assume you want to devise your own system and you're seeking a means to optimize the management/rendering for flora objects. If so,
Quote: "If the Flora doesn't require any visual persistence, I believe that a Particle System for managing the grass,flowers,rocks displaced on over the terrain could achieve the effect your looking for. A decoupled rendering system can by used to optimize the display of the grass, flowers, rocks objects in the Player's field of view."
For the Super 3D Game Engine, I intend to use the Particle System to manage all
massively replicated entities for visual effect: Flora, Flocks, Debris, Decals, Pyrotechnics, Lensflares. The Particle Engine controls a Particle's behavior and the rendering system controls a Particle's display in relation to the Player Camera.
A good majority of these visuals are handled using Sprites. Rendering Techniques such as
Quadtrees, octrees,
BSP-trees, back-face culling,
potential visibility sets can be used to determine the best possible subset of Sprites that need to be rendered based on the Player Camera.
