Poll New grass or old?

[Grey Roger]

The new installer includes a lot of replacement textures, including the grass, which has attracted some comments. The new grass texture is higher resolution so the plants are clearer to see, they're brighter, and they have a lot of red flowers. A Google Images search for "Caribbean wild grass" shows several pictures with similarly bright grass, though not with the red flowers, so I modified the grass texture to change the flowers pale yellow to look like seed heads.

So here are the alternatives:
Original grass:


Flowery new grass:


Deflowered new grass:


Dulled down version of the deflowered new grass:

 

[Mad Jack Wolfe]

I prefer the flower-less new grass. It best matches the grasses here in Florida and places I've visited around the Caribbean.

 

[Pieter Boelen]

From my side: NOT the old, at the very least.
All three alternatives look nicer.

In general, I do like "bright" but indeed having flowers everywhere doesn't make a ton of sense.
So option 3 seems like a good option to me.

 

[ANSEL]

Option 3 look just the best for me. About the flowers I agree with Pieter.

 

[HellSailor]

In my opinion, option 3 seems to be the best option for me. It looks the best.

 

[Jack Rackham]

I like the new textures which were improved with less flowers. But to me it's like if the good background music is too loud.
So that's why I prefer the not so bright greens.

 

[Grey Roger]

Here's another variant. The deflowered version colour-shifts and tones down the red flowers, effectively turning them into seed heads. Some bright yellow parts are still left. This version tones those yellow parts down as well, matching the ex-flower seed heads. The green grass is still the same.

 

[ANSEL]

It looks really good. Also a place with not so many flowers is better suited to Pirates and tough guys.

 

[Jack Rackham]

Go for that one. I can always change the grass in my game. Doesn't take a minute.

 

[Mad Jack Wolfe]

It looks really good. Also a place with not so many flowers is better suited to Pirates and tough guys.

I take it you've never been to St. Thomas. The tropical flowers and night-blooming jasmine aromas as I walked the Thousand Steps - trod by Teach, Vane, Rackham, Tew, and the like - from Blackbeard's (and just about every other pirate's) Tower to the main street were amazing.

We're pirates. We can do not nice things in the most beautiful settings, and the beauty remains.

 

[Sinbad the Sailor]

I take it you've never been to St. Thomas. The tropical flowers and night-blooming jasmine aromas as I walked the Thousand Steps - trod by Teach, Vane, Rackham, Tew, and the like - from Blackbeard's (and just about every other pirate's) Tower to the main street were amazing.

We're pirates. We can do not nice things in the most beautiful settings, and the beauty remains.

I agree!
I actually really like the flowers. Also imo it makes the ambience more immersive...

 

[Grey Roger]

There is another texture file, "grass_flower.tga.tx". As far as I can tell, this is only used for Kralendijk port. It wasn't included among the new textures which means it's still low resolution and dull. So Kralendijk port, which should be the only place that shows flowers, is currently the only place which doesn't! "grass_flower.tga.tx" seems to be mostly the same as "grass.tga.tx" but the plants are rearranged. So I've made a new version by rearranging the flowery "grass.tga.tx" to match, which means Kralendijk port will be properly flowered.

Other places could probably be made flowery as well, if you want. Here's the line in "PROGRAM\Locations\init\Douwesen.c" which does it:

Locations[n].models.always.grasspatch.texture = "Grass\grass_flower.tga";

It's part of the "Always" section of the definition for "Douwesen_port". You could probably copy the same line to other location definitions to make them flowery. I'd suggest only doing this for town and port locations, not jungles - someone might be tending the public gardens in town but they're unlikely to be tending the wilderness as well!

 

[Pieter Boelen]

I take it you've never been to St. Thomas. The tropical flowers and night-blooming jasmine aromas as I walked the Thousand Steps - trod by Teach, Vane, Rackham, Tew, and the like - from Blackbeard's (and just about every other pirate's) Tower to the main street were amazing.

But pirates are manly.
And flowers are girly.
They cannot go together!

(Yeah, I mean exactly nothing of what I wrote there. Doesn't make a shred of sense. )

We're pirates. We can do not nice things in the most beautiful settings, and the beauty remains.

Or we could be the other type of pirates and be peace-loving explorers and spreaders of good will in even the most ugly of settings.
Where then, hopefully, the ugliness would not remain.

It always strikes me as so odd in especially modern movies where "realistic" is equated to "dark" and that must be applied all across the board.
And so you get these outdoors visuals that are so de-saturated that they don't look anything like real life anymore at all.

Though that's not entirely a modern issue.
I remember there was a period review of the 1962 Mutiny on the Bounty that complained about its "postcard-picture-perfect scenery".
Now I must admit I've never been to Tahiti, but if the Caribbean is anything to go by, then it does look basically THAT pretty in real life.
But apparently people who've never been to the tropics have a hard time believing that this world right here actually can be quite colourful outside.

Other places could probably be made flowery as well, if you want. Here's the line in "PROGRAM\Locations\init\Douwesen.c" which does it

Ahaaaa; now that opens up options!
I'd say then, use ALL the new and improved textures; all in different locations.

There's plenty jungle locations reused between islands.
This could be a great way to set some of them apart.
Some can have dark grass; some lighter; and maybe one island could even have the flowers in the jungle.
After all, they might be wild flowers. Those exist too.

 

[Mad Jack Wolfe]

Or we could be the other type of pirates and be peace-loving explorers and spreaders of good will in even the most ugly of settings.
Where then, hopefully, the ugliness would not remain.

William Dampier springs to mind. He was a naturalist and explorer in addition to being a pirate. Science and exploring were his passions, piracy was a means to an end. I highly recommend the biography "A Pirate of Exquisite Mind", a fascinating read about a genuinely fascinating historical figure.

 

[Sand 2 Go]

There's plenty jungle locations reused between islands.
This could be a great way to set some of them apart.
Some can have dark grass; some lighter; and maybe one island could even have the flowers in the jungle.
After all, they might be wild flowers. Those exist too.

Now that was what I was going to say yesterday, but then I went like "I am not sure if there even are multiple grass variants in PotC"
Well... I do plan on learning tons more of stuff as I finally show the reason to my Storm Modder tag, which means I may not have to question about such stuff.

 

[ANSEL]

Flowerpower

 

[Grey Roger]

Here's a collection of grass textures. "grass.tga.tx" has the original grass with the flowers dulled down into seed heads; based on the poll so far, that will be the replacement grass texture going into the next update. "grass_dull.tga.tx" and "grass_dull2.tga.tx" are darkened and even more darkened versions of the same grass. I'll not be changing any locations to use these textures myself, but if anyone else wants to put darker grass using either of these into their choice of jungle locations, I'll add their changed location files plus the relevant texture(s).

 

[Jack Rackham]

William Dampier springs to mind.

 

[ANSEL]

Now I have grass_dull2.tga.tx in my game, that's really fine and looks great.

 

[Grey Roger]

The poll is heavily in favour of the new grass without flowers. So that's what is in the newest update:
Finishing Build 14 Final