Billboard grass don't look bad, especially in open fields. I think even Project Cars using it. However Grass very close to the road have problem, when it is too wide and for me it should be 3D or move further from the road.
but 3d glass (i assume) is fps intense... do you know how much foliage there will be on this map?! also Italy looks like it just might be my new favorite map, before i've even seen it!
Problem is will us peasants with moderately good computers be able to run them? Not every one has hundreds of dollars/pounds/euros laying around
let's see... look at the first computer in my sig, then here is my FPS number. It is a staggering 5-15 FPS! Plus, it takes over 5 minutes to load... so yeah, that's how I have come to be so patient.
even if they were to keep the billboard grass, and just have more of them with smaller amounts of grass.
You set a distance limit for it to be used, so that close to the player youll see the 3d grass, beyond that you can use billboards or just the ground texture. As @Acrain7 said, it could be a graphical setting, and i think its a good idea, although that might open up a whole world of map related settings that the devs might not want to spend time on. Looking at Project Cars i did see some use of billboard grass but seems like its due to graphics setting, or PC/PS4 version? They seem to use parallax texture for when youre really close to it:
Billboard grass is still widely used nowadays, along with fancy shaders (Far Cry series (3 and up) is a good example IMO, they use some nice translucency effects to make it appear more vibrant/less flat). (not 3D, but flat planes randomly rotated if you look closely) In post above is also billboard grass (seems fixed rotation rather than pointing the camera, along with some deformation when you drive over it)
Are those roads actually bumpy or just flat? The texture seems a littoe bit flat, consifering that those sort of roads are usually a little bit highier in the middle
A billboard's flat 2D thing that has a fixed location, however rotates to directly face the camera, that way it always looks flat depending on how you look at it. At-least that's how I understand it, correct me if I'm wrong. They've been around forever and don't show any sign of going anywhere anytime soon. You can use these in place of more resource intensive 3D objects to give the illusion of a 3D object, but with less cost on the system resources.
There are no ruts at the moment no. The heightmap isn't quite up to that. I've already done a few tests with other possibilities but so far I haven't found a good solution.
a solution to the billboard grass is something Giants has come up with. it's two of the billboard grasses put into an X configuration and it is static and doesn't move with the camera. also, I would like to say that I do not like the abandonment of .PNG file format for pictures. at least allow the modders to continue to use it. I've seen the high quality images used for the CRD turn into pixilated things from the PS2.
.DDS is a special format meant for games and that GPUs can work much with, saving lot of memory than common format, which have other kind of usages. See FAQ here: https://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/intel-texture-works-plugin .DDS has different compression formats, which will affect the texture. Each format is specialized in something (greyscale texture, or color texture, or normal map, etc.) Modern game engines (UE4 for example) automatically converts any texture you throw at them into those formats.
Game currently lacks (full) support for Premultiplied RGBA .DDS formats though, which could massively help in circumstances where the aggressive compression factors of both DTX3 and DTX5 simply don't cut it.
Yes, we miss some formats yet. Which one is that exactly? (some exporters calls them in different way)