What happened to the touch bending, binding a skeleton to plants on planets so that they can react to player characters moving through them? I remember seeing some early tests on ISC a while back. Any updates on that?
TL;DRTouch bending is part of a long-running new vegetation shader effort that also covers far-distance rendering, billboards, possibly wind, and color lookup tables enabling variation, seasons and plant health states.
So that's something that's been worked on for a long period of time, as Max and Sebastian already talked about. This is something that you don't do once and it's done. You want to study all the possibilities, all the different vegetation types, be it alien, be it more Earth-like. That's an effort that's being made in conjunction with a new vegetation shader that has been worked on for a while now and will still be worked on in the future, where we will not only have touch bending so that the player interacts with the vegetation, but also stuff like better far-distance rendering, which we will look into, better billboards, things like that. Probably new wind, if we have the possibility to study that, and also a new approach to coloring the vegetation, which will allow us to not only use LUTs, or what we call LUTs, which are basically color lookup tables that allow us to make very easy and fast variations of the same assets, but this is also something that will allow us to do stuff like seasons and health on plants, for example. So this is all an ongoing effort that's being done together with the touch bending and all of that.
Using LUTs to help depict seasons. That's the first I've heard of it.
Yes, so basically the current system doesn't allow for a very dynamic way to change the colors. Sometimes you might need to do some hacky ways to achieve that result, and there is ongoing progress on a new tech that will allow us to just recolor vegetation using those color lookup tables, essentially. And these will provide not only a better quality, but also make it easier to do that variation. So stuff like seasons will be possible, once that is done, of course. And also having health states for plants and stuff like that will be way better and easier.
Health states for plants? You shoot a plant in the arm and it gets an injury?
Yes, exactly. Let's see what the players do.