New oak-tree billboards in place

While I'm spending hours pouring over interfacing the flight model, AD has been tinkering with billboards again, finding a blend of shadows. There's still more to do, I want a ground fog layer, multiple layers, realistic light scattering and a more dynamic LOD system which we can't do yet. AD is reducing the tree poly counts from 1,500 to 500 on the LOD1s. This should improve shadow performance a little.

Looking at shadows again, I came across a GameDev.net post that I might look into. It's similar to the shadow system used in Brano's Outerra whole world engine. I'm not sure what it would do to a high bandwidth environment like a 3 monitor wide system. Probably no worse that using HDR or other post-processing effect.