Indeed, the tree demo is beautiful, but on the other hand it is extremely slow. I had "just" 30 fps on my machine and this is way too "expensive". I would need at least 50. Nevertheless, it looks very promising. Maybe they port it to LiteC and A7 when it comes out, so that it beenfits from the new renderer.

@Damocles: why do you apply an alpha value onto some of your sprites? This doesnt look good at all. Beside, nice thing.

I'm in the need of (many) good looking tree models. So, I tried different programs and trials. Its a bad situation at all: most programs suck for game development. Some are good, but then they do not offer enough possibilities to customize the tree.

I have to decide wether I buy premade models or a software so that I can generate my own. The most yet effective software for game development I came across is called "tree[d]". It is written by the maker of gile[s] and is free, though, you can only read these files with gile[s]. So if you own a gile[s] license, its great for you. Gile[s] can save all meshes to other formats, so gile[s] would be the converter for these trees.

Here is a GIF animation I captured: this is a tree I made with a few clicks with the preset textures and sprites and it looks cool.



Well, currently gile[s] 2 is in development and since A7 will handle different UV sets gile[s] will be a great tool for 3rd party illumination (radiosity!). I dont know if I buy this with the power to use tree[d] or if I buy premade models from loopix, terminal26 and so on.

Uhm.. I dont know. But I'm sure that I won't use a slow method since I plan to make heavy use of trees and plants. Sprite entities are too slow and I can't rely on a plugin that isnt ported yet to liteC (that terminal26 thing and/or Sphere2).