Swaying trees and plants

There are lots of nice plants on the ground that sway back and forth. Even the trees do that.

I don't know how much processing power that takes up, or if it is using CPU calculations (in a separate thread?) or the graphics card.

Can there be options to:
1) hide all the plants on the ground
2) hide some percent of plants on the ground
3) stop the plants on the ground from swaying
4) stop the trees from swaying*

I believe there are also particle effects in Braemer (little lights or glowing things in the air), plus flocks of birds in the sky. So additional options to filter those out (if it effects performance).

* I won't suggest removing trees, because if they block character movement and some people turn them off, others in MPO may see someone walking through trees or standing in one. And then what happens if you turn the trees back on while you are standing in its spot.

 

I don't think performance should be the main reason to make these permanent moving sequences optional, but there are gamers, who have troubles with all that permanently moving world on screen, kind of screen sickness similar to sea sickness.
Sorry if my English lacks to word this any better.

 

It will be a helpful indicator of wind strength and direction when weather is put in, if this animation is affected by weather.

Plus, some of the plants on the ground might be useful herbs.

 

I suggested more variance for the gusts and to vary which areas area effected (blowing)... It's probably a matter of whoever is doing the level design in Unity.

 

I agree with these suggestions, but also point out that at this point in the alpha dev phase they haven't fully optimised yet

 

Which is why they should have options to turn them off (assuming they do cause a performance hit). If people have smoother experience in game, they are more likely to stay online and test and explore and find out what works and what doesn't. The quality of the graphics is less import (at this time) than the conversation system with NPCs, crafting interfaces, stuck doors, places where you fall through the world, etc. Anything to help keep testers testing would be nice.

Of course they are probably trying to figure out where the performance hits are so they can see what needs to be optimized, so I wouldn't disable the features by default. Maybe even limit access to them (or make it difficult to change the settings) so you can cover both cases.

Get things working in pre-alpha, work on optimizations in beta, fine tune as much as possible closer to release. (IMHO)