Terrain look could be improved

[MCMic]

The water is now looking great, which makes the sand and grass looks ugly.
It would be awesome to have 3D grass (like this for instance : http://youtu.be/qUuAHDixHMk ).
Sand could have some particle effects when walked on so that it seems some sand goes into dust under pony hooves.
Water splash would be good too.

[ginkgo]

Hey MCMic,

I guess you could quite realistic grass effects with current hardware features. This paper is a good example of what is possible with hardware tessellation for instance:
http://www.cg.tuwien.ac.at/research/publications/2013/JAHRMANN-2013-IGR/

The way Blender does it is essentially brute-force, creating and rendering lots of geometry. This isn't really suitable for a real-time game.

The thing is that I sorta want to keep the hardware requirements of the game reasonably low. I also have the feeling that adding an effect like this would be too much work for me. Maybe some shell-based algorithm or a few bushes of grass scattered over the map like in Zelda Wind Waker might be an option.

I've created a thread on freegamedev to discuss feature additions to the game, btw: http://forum.freegamedev.net/viewtopic.php?f=22&t=5224