So I’m in the process of making my first area of my game. It’s basically a village surrounded by some hills covered in trees with a beach at one side of the map. I really just don’t know how to go about creating the forest. Obviously you could put each individual tree in, but this would take forever. I’m sure there must be an easier way. Also I want the trees to be interactive(for game skills eg. woodcutting)
This is a hugely technical issue. A forest is not just trees, its full of imposters (Imposters - Wolfire Games Blog) that represent trees. And having them all individually so you can chop them down adds some difficulties when batching.
You can take a look st some of the vegetation libraries people have posted on the forums to get a hint of what is involved.
Also look into noise algorithms for generating repeatably random trees. You can even place them completely randomly but limit them to certain slopes or elevations.
It can be done, it’s just very hard and will be time consuming.