Realistic grass textures. What could be a possible solution?

[Marc87dk]

No matter how many other simulators I try, I always find my way back to OR. However, there is one thing I kind of miss from other games that OR (to my understanding) does not currently have, which is realistic grass. OR still uses the same flat terrain textures that MSTS did, and if you want to have any grass sticking up from the ground, you have to add it yourself through objects, which can of course look nice, but if you want the whole tile covered by it, its gonna take forever.

So I wonder if there is a way you could actually implement this using some creativity. I was thinking of having a grass object as a forest object, but that is really only gonna work if your entire tile is flat, which is rarely the case. If you have any kind of hills, the grass object is gonna be floating in the air in many places.
But then I was thinking, what if we made a tiny grass object, like 3 or 4 straws and made that into a forest object that "hugs" the terrain, would it completely kill the performance if this was added to an entire tile?

I am really curious if anyone has ever tried this or tested other solutions.

[CSXT Q-317]

Have you tried using the forest method on current grass textures? That is about the best you are going to get here. It is the same thing TrainSimulations does with their routes like Ruel.

Even with older textures, it's still a step up from the grass blocks.

[eric]

As a true forest object, small clumps should easily follow the terrain.

As for killing performance... if you do a crazy ridiculous density, that's a possibility. But multiple cruciforms using a single texture shouldn't be a huge burden on a modern CPU/GPU.

[CSRX]

Grassy sections you say?

This is using the grass forest region from the MRL Mullan Pass route. For this specific location, I used the "marsh" version. When it comes to any forest region, Andrew Collins had a really good tip to keep them at 100x100 blocks and simply copy and paste that block as desired. For this specific location, I have used 100x100 blocks, with a population of 500, which gives a density per KM of 50,000. Which works well for the marshes of the Fore River in Portland, ME.




Another section I used the grass version, and bumped up the population to 2500, which you can fill in anywhere between 1500-5000 and it will look pretty decent. As you can see, because of the small style textures, they flow pretty well on the raised terrain.