My Kingdom for a coder right now

Towards the end of the week I walked into class for my team mate to tell  me the level was broken but he said it with a smile so there was a good two minutes of awkward blinking confusion before I realised that the level was in fact broken. Not the 'there's problems here, here and here' broken but the 'This isn't opening correctly and even if it does open it crashes when we try to change anything'. Yeah, that kind of broken.

Luckily before we gave up and reverted to an older save file or more likely, all jumped in the river Soar it was discovered that it turned out to be mix up with level streaming and ignoring the 'fatal error' messages we get that we're currently pretending aren't there that got resolved but that doesn't make us problem free. Issues in the level are still springing up, mainly with the frame rate which has been an thorn in our side for quite some time now. We're getting 15-25 fps and lower at times like when you're standing in the woods.

Speaking of woods, tree time. I've been putting this one to the back of my asset list as long as I could manage but at some point I'm just going to have to suck it up and get it done. Tell the hedges I'm sorry for the things I said about them, at least they aren't trees...well they are trees but you caught my drift.

 So my tree from the list of native UK plant life I researched was a crab apple tree which not only grows very densely with lots of little leaves but also likes to bloom with bright pink or white blossoms before it grows it's apples. Basically I had no idea how to approach this. Trees can turn very high poly very quickly if you don't watch your modelling and it's a tree that naturally grows dense so my options to me seemed to be, number 1 which was lots of alphas, a whole bunch of them or number 2, which is to put more leaves and branches on the alpha. I tried method 2 but it looks really odd when you look up at the branches. So now there's option 3, which is try to find a balance between the two first options and hope for the best.





As I thought I would, I did have trouble getting the density I needed but a move annoying issue I had was that I can't get the blossoms to show up against the green of the leaves. I make the branches with a high ratio of flowers to leaves, I've tried the flowers in different shades of pink but the green always overpowers it.

I plan to leave it for now and return when I've gotten some of my other assets done because it's started to drive me a little bit mad.

I hate trees