Brno BVE Website

As for the vegetation randomization, you are right, Quork. Such change (randomization implementation) would require a change on the program level; the "RND" command/parameter would have to be introduced. This would help for example with rotation etc. To be honest, I would be happy to have more tree textures, but those are hard to create. The trees usually grow in groups and you cannot really define the proper border between each other's branches and also, if you have a picture suitable for testure, it gives you hell to separate the actual texture in a way that does not ruin it. :-(

Is it just me, or is the window for message sending new?

It kinda depends on if pluses would outnumber the minuses I guess. But! I was also thinking about a new concept - to add rotation into an .animated file, where the RND could be available if I am not mistaken. Here's the cons though:

1) If the RND is defined in an *.animated file, it will probably be calculated only once (when the route is loading) and then, whenever you put the object into a route, you get the same-looking thing again. 

2) Randomizing the rotation for every single object would probably increase HW demands. Now, we have a given value that is associated with the given object. If we were to randomize things around, the number shuffling processes required for that would most probably add to CPU/GPU load.

You are right, you can apply the calculation after certain conditions are met. That, however, puts a load on the GPU I think.

 So, I have had a look at the new textures you provided, Quork. They are nice and useful, but also a bit bigger than I would have expected... for a tree, 512x512 is fairly enough. Imagine if I put like 50 trees into any 600 meters of the route. That would be 50 x 1.6 MB... only for tress. 

 Well, I am not entirely sure how it works, but I think once you need to display let's say 50 trees, the GPU still needs to process it 50 times as they are in different positions (near x far, rotated etc.). Or am I mistaken?

I am not touching the size as that always messes up the transparent color - creates pixels or whole areas with very similar, but still different color. Rather than that, I used Photoshop and transformed the textures into 8 bits resolution. they look the same and the size is significantly smaller - the biggest tree, which had 1.6M now has 560K. 

 As mentioned above, I use Adobe Photoshop. It is capable of exporting the textures in 8-bit colors, and I can use the preference "Save for web and devices", which does a progressive scan and saves another space by adjusting color palette. This might be something similar to what you are suggesting.

So the trees have been slightly modified and put to what I hope is a good use. That, however, is up to the others to judge. Please provide feedback on the following screenshots. Enlarge for full resolution.