Animated trees - are they laggy?

[Nika Talaj]

I am amused to see that landscaping in SL has come full circle, and after years of effort, we have managed to get trees to be like they were in 2005.  Sort of!

There are many mesh trees on the market that are animated; the branches wave around, tho I don't think they do so in response to SL wind.  You can make Hayabusa's trees toss like they're in a hurricane, but most creators confine themselves to a gently waving motion that you can turn on or off.  I don't know how they do this; it doesn't really look like animated textures on the mesh.  But then, I didn't know how the original Linden trees and grasses waved in the breeze either!  I'm up for education on this 

My question: if you put a forest of these trees in a sim, would they lag the server?  And/or, do they have the potential to lag clients?

[Callum Meriman]

Most of them use a texture slide, that is a client side effect, not the server.

Too many of them can drop the client's FPS a little, but not as much as alpha does.

 

The original trees were made using a library called SpeedTree (from memory).