[klem]

The current trees look very poor. They are also a resource hog and it is not necessary to populate the whole of the countryside with individual trees. They are so numerous that the collision model has had to be removed as it would cause even the top PCs to grind to a halt. Far better to use fewer larger forest and hedgrow models and perhaps, where necessary, some individual trees and all with collision model. Larger, simpler, but graphically acceptable forest models could replace the current tree count at a rate of 100 to 1 or more and include collision modelling.

The trees we have at the moment are daft. They are tree shaped but all that glistening caused by artificial 'breeze' effect looks mickey-mouse, unrealistic and IMHO pointless. Its one area where the attempt to meet the film-makers wishes has gone badly wrong. By all means include them in the SDK if that is to have map-making capabilities but remove them from the core game.

Start again with several different sizes of forest blocks that can be built into larger forest areas and the same for a few hedgerows. I live in Southern England and it doesn't look like the mickey-mouse result you get when you turn Forest 'on'. In fact I turn Forest Off or very Low and from height the underlying map forest area images are good enough for me, a bit like flying over photo-terrain in FSX with scenery Autogen turned off (but not as good/realistic obviously). But I would prefer to have 3D forests, hedgrows and even individual trees with a collision model that our PCs can handle.

Also, once the trees are sorted and playable I'd like to see Forest become a server setting.