Allow us to make our own "linden trees"

So, the new trees provided to us by Linden Lab are nice and all. They do a good job of being realistic.

I was wondering if there were any plans of letting us users be able to make our own realistic tree types?

I mean sure, we can use the sprites and make a reasonable facsimile, but these never blow in the wind, or look detailed enough to even compare to the Linden trees.

I imagine it wouldn't be a simple process (my vague guess is the trees use fractals to be made), but it would be another step in letting us users create the world

LF

That would rock!

You can make your own trees all you want, there are some sliders hidden in the debug menu, and also you can edit the XML files in the SL folder, but they wont be seen by other people...
I agree that a tree editor would rawk

I've tried fiddling with those, but never saw a difference

LF

Not a great solution, but a temporary one might be to use a particle system.

That's all well and good, but the advantage of using stock trees is that you could probably transmit a tree in under 100 bytes (probably alot less) -- something like "Tree at <10,20,13>, orientation <0,1,0>, type #3". With custom trees you'd have to transmit a whole lot more... == very laggy forests.
Of course, I may be wrong, but it seems the SL community is divded... half want less lag, the other half want more features (+ therefore more lag)... hmm..

Nah, we just want more Kritter!
And more sl00ts!
and... and... CHOCOLATE!

particles are more demanding than textures built into the client. and scripted blowing trees will bring even a hyperthreaded sim to it's knees.

the beauty of the linden trees is that the textures are built into the client. our pcs render them by waving default textures across our screens with just some coords & stats from the server. the debug stuff, and the tree slider in preferences, tell my client how many branch and leaf textures to render. that perfectly lovely linden tree you set out might look very full and rich, or very skrimpy, on my client.

a tree editor that facilites random public tree creation, like we're talkin about, will have to incorporate hundreds, maybe thousands, of textures. i don't know that it would cause any major lag on our end, but somebody's gotta design and add them all. i imagine their working on this in a back room somewhere. they likely won't talk about it though because there are a lot more people that will scream bug fix at them than there are of us.

/almost forgot to stamp endorsement

I endorse and support this suggestion

OH.. and.. I fully agree with LF

W00! Good save, you could have been shouted at for trolling or hijacking there.

Which means I need to also agree with LF to save this post from being a troll. Oh wait. I already agreed. Doh.

Oh wait. I know! Has anyone seen XFrog? Yes, it's very, very complex. But the basic premise i'm sure is something we could have, and would be uber cool if we had sliders that could sprout leaves and branch configurations in the same fractally kinda way, albeit much simplified.

Xfrog

using the sliders in debug you can make linden trees that others see same as you but its really random as far as i can tell. i left all the settings in one position but moved the leaves slider each time i rezzed a new tree and it went from pine tree to palm tree to some sort of oak tree?
some sort of guide to the tree sliders would be nice

Um, that has nothing to do with your debug sliders. When you rez linden trees with the create tool, what you get is pretty much random. Which, btw, Lindens... SUCKS. Why in hells name would I want to delete four out of five trees to get a crop of the ones I want? And why dont we have a scatter mode? Pfft.

As far as my experiments with the debug sliders go, I have seen precisely no change at all either to existing or new trees. Frankly, I dunno what they do, but if someone can show me I'd be very interested to see.

I would imagine, given I do this stuff all of the time (not in SL), that this would need to wait until residents can import 3D models. Sure, it would rock if we could edit the "billboard" textures Linden Trees use... it's the high-res detail that's the problem.

Also, we DIRELY need a better tree tool!
What's the deal with this random thing?
If I live in the snow sims, should I be rezzing palm trees and seaweed instead?

I agree. Out of curiosity, does anyone use the "random tree" feature anyway? I tend to just seek out my inventory trees in instances that I need them.

Ohhhh yes please!!! I love trees!

Nah, it wouldn't increase overhead much--why?

Say you make 4 or 5 custom tree types for your forest... the client downloads those 4 or 5 tree configurations once each (this is the extra overhead), and also gets whatever it needs to get now (location, etc). So there isn't much new data being sent over the wires.

BTW, I thought the community wanted less lag AND more features?