A question for lazy developers.

How do you design an entire forest with the least amount of effort? 
You lay down the principles and let the computer do the rest of the work for you.

Keeping in line with the mechanics of the rest of the game, we are letting the game engine generate the trees in the forest by itself.

What we will do is make a library of tree bark and define rules for tree-like skeletons. The skeletons are created using L-systems - which are like a simple "grammar" to describe plantlike shapes.  The game engine will then procedurally paste tree bark textures together and cut them into shape.

This is just a first rough draft, with only 10 bark samples in the library.  Imagine how it will look after tweaking and tons of (and better) samples...

- Nicolas