The first thing that caught my eye coming here is someone saying how alot of grass causes a huge slow down. I thought this engine was capable of unlimited foliage like cry engine with its renderer ?
I have the best graphics card out at the moment under 1k and a 3770k and I just want to make a trailer with the engine. My question,
Can I have a ton of *grass* as well as trees on my map? Because my environment requires it..
Or will the draw distance have to bee so low that its not good?
I left UDK because it cant do that much transparency with realtime dynamic lighting without slowing down even with instancing.

My environment is pretty similar to 'just cause 2'.

One of the reasons I love your engine is because it seems the most affordable alternative to cry engine (but their 'indie' license is not ready yet)

Thanks very much

Even the CryEngine doesn't use unlimited foliage.
If you look closely, you just see very smart level design (and sure, it's a powerful engine too).

On the EE roadmap, you'll find: "hardware instancing or grass merging", which should help a lot with lots of foliage.

However, you don't need to buy anything to give it a try. With the basic (free) version, you get access to everything you need to start out. So, just try!

I agree that if you're going for pure graphics, the Cry Engine will give better results. But EE is very nice to work with in general.

EDIT: Welcome!

Sorry not necessarily unlimited but I meant not having very much restriction in a very dense jungle. hw instancing / grass merging should be a top priority, I'm glad its at least on the roadmap.

Cryengine is not an option though because they don't have a license, only for very very big projects they privately gave the new royalty one to like 2 or 3 teams, but its almost impossible to get one.

I was so amazed when I stumbled upon this engine until I read about performance issues with too much grass & trees. Is it really that bad?
If you were for example to make a dense jungle similar to crysis or just cause 2, would you really only get single digit fps? Or if you had a beast pc would it be good with some minor draw distance optimizations?

Thanks for the response

With some clever design and optimizations, you can get very nice results in EE. But I do believe you'll have to be more careful than in CE.

The best thing I can recommend you is: Download some trees somewhere (Check TurboSquid, price Range: 0-0), and place a whole lot of them in your scene.
You can just play it in the editor, or launch it from code (World With Character would be a good base to start from, just replace the world it loads).
Keep in mind that some settings drastically lower FPS (Such as SuperSampling and Ambient Occlusion). Playing with those can give good effects already.