IDV, a games development middleware company, has a great-looking demo of their real-time foliage rendering software, SpeedTree. If you’re not running modern graphics hardware, you’re pretty much out of luck, but for those of us who’ve spent far more money on graphics cards than we ought to have, the demo is impressive. I can’t believe how much enjoyment I got out of wandering around a valley full of virtual trees. It could be a sign that I need to get out more and experience real trees, which have been impressively rendered since the dawn of the eyeball several million years ago.
I’d like to see some games make good use of SpeedTree. The demo’s pretty cool, but it would be much more interesting to be running around those trees and enacting bloody carnage on digital adversaries who richly deserve death.
