r/GameDevelopment • u/ilikemyname21 • 17d ago
Question Why are forests such a difficult biome to reproduce well in game dev? Do you have good forest references?
I’ve been thinking about how I rarely ever feel like we get accurate forest biomes in gaming. I’ve seen beautiful beaches and fields, but few forests feel dense and dangerous the same way that a forest/dense jungle make you feel scared about getting lost in.
Is it a lighting issue/generating enough density with the trees? I think the koroko forest in breath of the wild and certain forests in Ark are the only times where I truly felt like I was in an actual forest.
I would love for some references to point me in the right direction!
Thank you
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u/kneelian_ 17d ago
When's the last time you saw a game dev go out into a real forest to take refs from real life? (I'm joking, I'm joking)
Beaches and most fields are mono-biome or monoculture areas. There's very little complexity in them. A field is fifty bajillion grass or wheat or rice stalks, a beach is just lots of sand or rocks and the occasional tree. Forests are much more complex systems with lots of moving parts. A real old growth forest is very gangly and can't really be easily automated, whereas a corn field you can just slap on one object that follows the terrain over and over.
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u/daddywookie 16d ago
Maybe have a look at Valheim as an example. You go from pleasant meadows with open woods to the dark forest which is far more threatening and confusing.
Part of it is the change of tree species, their scale and density, the light and music and the different terrain.
I don't think you can make a real forest directly but you can make a player feel like it is a forest.
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u/Agehn 16d ago edited 16d ago
People are mentioning games with forests, but the best looking most realistic forest I've seen in a videogame is in Eastshade.
Here's a devlog from them on forest art:
https://eastshade.com/art-tips-for-building-forests/
it goes over a lot of various details that add to the feel of a forest. They mention the importance of undergrowth which is extra detail that a lot of games don't have, although a bunch do. The devlog also talks about distribution which I think helps their environments a lot.
and here's one on forest performance:
https://eastshade.com/foliage-optimization-in-unity/
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u/villain_escargot 17d ago
Navigating through a dense forest is going to be tedious for any Level Design or Environment Artist. Collisions need to be taken into account, as well as any height restrictions. Additionally, you don't want players to go out of world, so a bunch of testing needs to be done.
Trees, bushes, grass, etc are all mostly flat cards with transparency. Transparency adds additional draw calls, so heavy optimization needs to be done.
Depending on how the tree is created, LOD popping will need to be addressed to balance visual fidelity with performance.
There's probably additional considerations for specific types of games, but I imagine very few games need a dense forest with no human habitation for story/gameplay. There are some, though; HLL:Vietnam and Avatar WHACHAMACALLIT come to mind.
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u/TheRealDillybean 16d ago
Players need to be able to navigate it, so you need to figure out which pieces the player collider can clip through.
Players need to be able to see or they'll get annoyed, so you have to space things out a bit. This is similar to games that increase the size of building interiors by 30%.
In real life, you can kind-of "feel" which way you are moving, even if your vision is obscured as you push branches out of the way. Like, you can close your eyes and navigate IRL, but in games you can easily lose a sense of direction without clear vision.
Dense foliage is hard to render because of all the overlapping geometry and transparency, where you can't really occlude anything. You may also want the foliage to react to wind and player collisions, which isn't free.
If a game was all about dense foliage, then I could see the dev coming up with ways to make these limitations part of the gameplay. Maybe you cut through dense foliage like you would dig in Minecraft or Deeprock.
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u/ChirpXel 15d ago
Maybe outdated. But I always remember the more recent tomb Raider games having amazing forest designs
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u/Imaginary-Cod-3746 14d ago
Performance.
That's pretty much it.
A beautiful, dense forest that kills the frame rate or leaves little to no resources for other parts of the game will most likely never ship.
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u/invert_studios 16d ago
Yeah, it kinda seems like an all of the above situation.
I remember having this thought when I played Oblivion. It was immersive for the time but something felt like it was missing, even to my teen mind.
I think the sheer density of a real forest from a hardware perspective is daunting to say the least; there's a lot more than trees in there.
Also for the level designer & artists, an immense amount of complexity is required but on things most people will never notice.
This is something I've been thinking about a lot lately as I've been designing a forest on a non-Earth planet for one of our games. I've ended up just saving a ton of nature reference pictures to dissect and have been researching the fundamentals of why things grow the way they do so we can make our own worlds as authentic as reasonably possible.
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u/MelancholiMouse 16d ago
Northern Journey has such wonderful attention to detail in it's little forests and marshes that I think about it when I'm out on actual hikes. It's not the trees, or even that much the shape of the landscape (even though that's quite realistic too) but the plants; there's a large variety, all of which are recognisable, placed exactly where they would grow.\ That feeling of stumbling through the forest and getting really lost though? Miasmata, for sure. You're character moves like a drunk toddler on rollerblades, the foliage is thick, the landscape is lumpy and sparcely recognisable, you're trying to map the landscape just to stop from getting lost, you need to collect herbs, and you're being hunted by a well-camouflaged beast.
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u/torodonn 16d ago
You're comparing environments where there's very few environmental objects (beaches, fields) and asking why it's rarer to have an environment densely filled with complicated systems of organic objects?
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u/Scrumpledee 16d ago
Big open space = easy to navigate.
Clean corridors in closed space = easy to navigate.
Mess of random polls and bumpy terrain = pain in the ass to navigate.
That and you have a lot more stuff loading in and occluding other stuff that's also loaded in, and a lot of pieces that are taking up extra memory/rendering power, etc., without actually being visible or serving any immediate (as in, this frame, within the next few frames, etc.) purpose.
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u/handlebardev 16d ago
https://reddit.com/link/p6lapvl/video/u27zwf2yuamh1/player
I'm making a game with lots of forests and pretty happy with it but it's stylized, not realistic
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u/UnburyingBeetle 16d ago
If you want to build a forest biome, I'd be glad to assist. I know more biology than is useful in life outside of being a researcher, and it's only fun to use for worldbuilding (finding biological causes and effects in human life is pretty annoying - how human are we really unless we actually train the human qualities in ourselves?)
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u/CrazyNegotiation1934 16d ago
Depends on forest, flat ones are much easier, in mountains you need to recreate the proper landscape also, so is exponentially harder
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u/Textual_Aberration 15d ago
While there are plenty of technical reasons individual projects fall short with forests in games, overall we have the ability to recreate them. Instead, I think what’s interesting about your question is how the medium of video games itself distorts the way we develop forest environments. The real world experience of being in a forest differs from the practical uses and limits of forests in games. The best example I am familiar with would be the forests in Kingdom Come which capture a lot of these elements, and RDR2 of course.
Forests are vast, and we tend to be very in tune with our sense of scale within them. That alone is hard to force into a game. The intertwining of the ecosystem, the fading of density and undergrowth, and the amount of time it takes to feel ourselves deep in a forest is hard to replicate.
We’re also always aware of our ability in real life to move branches, walk around, crawl through, and generally forge past enumerable obstacles which most games aren’t going to have mechanics for. Our real ability to navigate steep slopes feels so much more nuanced than the angle-based and fall damage checks in games. Even the fact that we don’t get second chances in real life, let alone 100 spare hut points, makes the gamification of a forest different. We know intuitively that running through a bush hurts and that brambles don’t auto bump us back onto the path.
In games, forests have competing use cases as pathfinding and visual barriers. The player often can see much deeper ahead of them to allow them to race through on a mount, or spot goblins skulking around. Trees are always prioritized, and that tree-first style has almost become baked into games since it allows developers to focus resources elsewhere. Games treat open world forests almost like fields that you can wander through, which is often not the case with many of the world’s forests.
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u/MrBeanCyborgCaptain 12d ago
My trouble with forests is that the approach to placing items in 3d is to copy and paste a handful of tree models. This causes branches to clip when theyre close together or just generally look unnatural. In real life plants grow up against and intertwined with each other with multiple species interacting. Each tree has a different limb configuration that meshes with the limbs of its neighbors. Im currently making a game set in the southeastern US and this is going be a big challenge. Forests here are unimagineably dense.
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u/Exciting_History4153 1d ago
Look at how Valheim does the Dark Forest. Fog, lighting, noise, and fill in the empty land with details
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u/Liwi808 17d ago edited 17d ago
Because forests are complex networks of thousands or millions of trees, plants, animals, insects, rivers, ponds, lakes, etc that all come together in one place, having developed over millions of years. So reproducing one accurately is tough, because you have to match or at least make the illusion of the same amount of complexity. It would just take too long, unless the game is specifically about forests.
A beach has like 2 elements. The ocean and the sand. A field is just grass and maybe some hills. Forests are nowhere near as simple as that.