I am not sure if this is the right part of the forums to discuss this. So if not - please move it to where it is supposed to go. Thanks!
Some observations on Plant Life and Tree Magic:
First off - Nice programs.
The outlook of the programs is to provide a way to create trees and/or plants. The emphasis is on doing this so you can include the trees and plants into games. The problem with this is that - what if you just want to generate images of trees and/or plants so you can get the images themselves? You can not do so easily unless you write your own program to load in the previously generated objects and then do the necessary rotations et al. What I am saying is - what if I'm trying to write a game that is to be played via the net -> using a browser? Dark Basic helps generate the scenes or animations - but what if what I am after are just still images that I can then load in to Visio or Photoshop, manipulate the images, and then use them on a web page? Or what if I wanted to generate the images and then just display them as a part of the web page's border?
Since both programs can using DB's ability to save to some image format, wouldn't it make sense to make the programs do this? Lots of uses come to mind other than the one presented above. The images could be used in advertisements, to help set up what kind of a game you are working on, to help when trying to persuade management you need more funds, etc.... I'm not talking about making a ray tracer or anything like that - just being able to take snapshots of roughly what you are doing would go a long ways.
Also the ability to add/remove the grids. In Tree Magik this isn't as big of a problem because you have the preview option. But in Plant Life the grid never goes away - even when you make the background image appear. But removing the grid should be one of the options provided in both programs.
For now I can just save the images to a file format that is readable by some other program (like Pov-Ray) and take snapshots that way - but it would be really nice to just be able to grab some rudimentary shots so you can give an idea to someone of how something should look.
Other than this - I'm really impressed by how much DB has grown and all of the other programs that come with the SDK. Keep up the great work!
I've got a black hole in me pocket.
