I had this idea while looking at some trees. Yep, thats how it happened.

Anyway, I know the best way to have a forest of now identical trees is to have some sort of procedural code to generate branchs and the likes, however this requires two things. Coding knowledge and processing power.

So a simple idea I had, although don't have time to test myself, involves simply having a few sets of different parts of the tree which get put together pre-game start.

Now this works for both 2d and 3d. Although it will be trickier for 3d.

You'd break down the tree into four parts:

1) Trunk base/roots

2) Trunk top/lower tree top

3) Middle tree top

4) Upper tree top

For each part you would create at least 3 varients that can match up.

For sprite based method, provided that either A)theres no shading, B) shade caused by directly above light source, you can flip the sprites to double the possible combinations. You can have them overlap, just make sure you do it in the right order.

For model based methods, provided you do it just right, you can have the parts vary in their rotations to create an even larger variety of combinations.

That and scaling. However I'd recommend that you know how to handle models before you attempt at scaling it. Reason would be that the objects points of origin would vary and cause distortion, so you'd need something to compensate its position based on the scaling size.

Sorry no code, but then this should not be too hard to code.

Anyone up to it?