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I haven't run through the grass in a video game since Ocarina of Time, so those modern screenshots really impressed me.

Have there been any games that tried to include species diversity in their grass? Around here anyways, there are 6 or 8 major pasture species, often in different growth stages at any given time of year.

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> Have there been any games that tried to include species diversity in their grass?

Minecraft, if you squint?[0] Obviously that's not any kind of graphical fidelity to real grass though.

[0] There's a couple of variants of grass which is then tinted to reflect the biome you're in. Some of the terrain mods add a bunch of new grasses ("betternether" springs to mind)

I think you might catch a butterfly or two in some games, but it's rare. I agree these nature environments often feel totally dead in games. Same with nature sounds. Devs usually get a bigger boner simulating wind and contact physics on each individual blade of grass (like this blog post does in part 3, of course).

Developers interested in speciation have a tendency to fall prey to genetic algorithms and simulations, and eventually lost to those ratholes

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