Trees that step aside

A few days ago the trees in Felucca grew to their real size. An oak is now taller than a two-storey house, and that looks great from a distance. Walk into a forest, though, and the crowns swallow you: you lose your own character, and you lose the trunk you came to chop.

So crowns now step aside. Walk up to a tree, or stand where its crown covers you on screen, and its leaves fade out in a third of a second. The trunk and the branches stay. Walk away and the crown comes back.

Why not just cut the leaves away

Our first try was to erase the leaf pixels of the tree you stand next to. Every sprite already knows which of its pixels are leaves, because leaves scatter into particles when a tree breaks. But a tree drawn from above has no trunk inside its crown. The leaves covered it when we baked the picture, so nothing of it was ever drawn. Erase the leaves and an oak turns into a two-metre stump.

So every leafy tree is now baked twice: once as you see it, and once with the leaves turned invisible. The second picture shows the whole trunk and every branch, including the parts the crown used to hide. When a crown hides, the game swaps the tree pixel by pixel to that second picture, in the same dithered pattern our pixel art uses everywhere. The shadow stays the whole tree's, so the ground under it keeps its shade.

Your choice

The settings window (O) has a new line, Tree crowns:

• auto, the default: crowns near you, or covering you, fade out.
• always: every crown is hidden, and the forest becomes a forest of trunks. Handy if you are out to cut wood.
• never: crowns stay. The see-through circle around your character still opens a window through them.

Breaking a tree works the same as before. Hit the trunk and it cracks, and when it breaks the hidden leaves still burst into a shower of leaves.