@LesterBoffo:
The terrain and materials waving grass/crop shader does an admirable job on it's own, why attempt to model millions of little shader sprites when it'll haul down the frame rates of the average potential FG user's PC with an integrated vid card?
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Ah yes, the 'real video card' putdown
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I'm frankly not sure what your point here is. Maybe you could just state it plain so that I understand it as well?
I'm looking at your screenshots, and what I see is lots of ALS ground shaders (often with seasonal effect running) as well as AW clouds.
Flashback a few years, and you can read all those comments about 'why spend so much work on this when all it does is cost framerate' or 'we already have different seasons by texture, why make a shader do it when it's so much easier'. Flash back even more and you'll find tons of comments how stupid the whole concept of AW is (or even that it can't be done,...)
In other words, if I'd have listened to people expressing pretty much the same sentiment as you do now, you would have nothing of what you seem to enjoy in your screenshots.
Fast-forward a few years from all these comments and take a tour of FSWeekend, and you get to talk to FSX users who get envious about FGs weather rendering (the one that used to be called 'waste of framerate') or to an old virtual Helicopter pilot who got all starry-eyed when he learned that we can do grass waving and water churning when exposed to rotor wash, a feature he's been waiting for for a very long time.
So at the end of the day, really all I can read in your comments is that
you would allocate development resources differently. Well, that's fine - you allocate
your resources how you like to - if you have a better grass effect, you make a merge request and we integrate it - that's how the fur shader came into the game, IcecodeGL wrote it and made a merge request.
But to hijack this thread to tell us that you want
my development resources allocated differently because your taste in visuals is different from mine, that's, sorry to say, a bit petty.