New Xenoblade 2 gameplay

[Nuvendil]

curl-6 said:

Nuvendil said:

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.

Not *all* the folliage in XCX is a billboard, that would be some 1995 level nonsense :P .  There were some bushes in XCX that were meshes, which was better than XC where pretty much all the small bushes were billboards.  And XCX did refrain from using billboards in place of proper 2D planes for leaves on trees (which is how XC did it and was common in the early 7th gen).  But my point is that it's a significant step up, drastically increasing the polygonal density of the scene.  Trees are a more obvious step up.  XCX didn't have very good normal trees.  The trees here are more full with better,  more numerous leaf planes.  XCX skirted this by not having very many normal trees of notable size, instead yaving a lot of palms, giant fungi, and giant ferns.