New Xenoblade 2 gameplay

[curl-6]

Nuvendil said:

curl-6 said:

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.  

IIRC, some of the bushes/shrubs in XCX looked like that, in that they were multiple intersecting 2D planes, though the actual tufts of grass were billboards.