New Xenoblade 2 gameplay

[Nuvendil]

curl-6 said:

Nuvendil said:

...That's not a sprite.  A srite used in this way is called a Billboard.  It's a sprite in the sense it is 2D and always faces the camera, but is fixed to a specific spot in a 3D space.  It's not a plane, which is just a flat, 2D mesh. 

The grass is made of planes, 2D meshes that bisect each other.  Fallout 3, 4, Skyrim, Final Fantasy XV, Witcher 3, Farcry 3, 4, Grand Theft Auto IV, V, and on and on use this exact method.  The only modern open world games that I know of that DON'T use this are Xenoblade Chronicles 1 and X (which use billboards) and Breath of the Wild (which uses meshes of some kind for every single blade of grass).   

In computer graphics, doesn't a "mesh" describe the vertices, edges, and faces that make up 3D geometry? That grass isn't 3D geometry, it is flat 2D planes.

A mesh is simply a 3D object made of vertices, edges, and face.  Whether it forms a square, spehere, or other multifaced closed geometric form is irrelevant.  These are grass meshes:  

This is a Skyrim grass mesh:

This is how the meshes look.  This is one where the individual planes that make up the mesh are visible:

You can walk around the mesh and so on, which is actually the bigges difference as Billboards have 1 side, meshes have multiple.  A billboard is 1 plane and only faces the camera.  It's a very big difference performance wise.  That's why the draw distance, though multiplied by 3 or 4 times in this demo vs E3, is still shorter than in XCX.