The tiling of the water at a distance is solvable by using stochastic texture sampling, which is a pretty straightforward thing to do, though requires a few extra texture samples. In this case, I think it would have been worth it.
You're totally right, I'm not sure how I haven't heard of this. The extra texture samples wouldn't be that big of a deal I don't think, I assume they're already doing this for the terrain texturing too.
@@Acerola_t It's such an easy thing, and I'm always so surprised at how many AAA games fail to use it in really obvious instances like terrain or water texturing.
Another cheap method is to just sample the same texture multiple times and just scaling up the uv coordinate by a non-even scalar. And then averaging. It means you can break up the pattern a bit. There's an awesome video that talks about how nintendo has done similar stuff to this in the past. /watch?v=8rCRsOLiO7k&ab_channel=Jasper Not as nice as a stochastic sampling but helps a bit. EDIT: Didn't see the post immediately underneath this one XD...
Honestly the whole game just kind of has that first time game dev feel (which I'm assuming doesn't come from the incompetence of the devs but rather a lack of resources/time given by higher ups) which is a shame considering how huge the franchise is.
The size of the franchise is the games downfall imo, Pokémon has outgrown Gamefreak several times over. They are chained to a tight release schedule alongside all of the other merchandise like TCG, plushies, anime etc and because of that they can never delay the games to improve them or set their own timeframe. There's a common trend these days of 'good' games generally being games that delayed their release, but Gamefreak will never get that opportunity because Pokémon is a global franchise with many components. All of the mainline games since Gen 6 onward have telltale signs of cut content. Its a shame because I love the games.
@@JoeDraws5 Nah I blame the "Lets split up our main team and interns." mentality the Main team worked on XY and SWSH while the interns did ... every other game and it shows. This game was a rush job after they decided to drop this mentality after SWSH imploded hard. Far better game with no stupid gimmicks just a new good looking engine. I have worries that they returned to the Split teams shit again with SV especially since new gimmick is back and worse than ever. The Gameplay of battles in PLA was a huge improvement visually but it looks like we are returning to tiny spawned arenas of old again.
I think it's reasonable to be upset at a pokemon game looking this bad considering there's better looking games on the same console, and Pokemon as a franchise rakes in obscene amounts of money. No hate on the developers themselves, this disappointing graphical executions could probably be blamed almost entirely on higher ups not wanting to part with their money bags because they know a Pokemon game will make a return no matter what. Pokemon has incredible potential that just isn't being realized because its already succeeded too hard.
absolutely, unfortunately even if the graphical stuff is fixed the gameplay is still arguably no more engaging than the original pokemons and in my opinion worse than the originals.
@@banned2638 SwSh took 3 and the group that handled let's go made legends so 3 years for this lines up nicely. The issue is the core development team is really small and has to use lots of outsourcing. They probably aren't given a AAA worthy budget despite Pokemon games normally being in the top 3 for best selling games of the year.
@@sylvyboi given how the intern "team B" has made good looking stuff and decent games over the Core "Team A" with only a 3 man difference and no outsourcing just reusing old assets. Gotta say Core team is the bad team.
I think part of the design of the trees (and much of the game) is meant to reflect traditional Japanese and Chinese ink art that was more minimalist but if they were going to go in that direction, they probably should have exaggerated it even more.
Exactly! You don’t have to have stunning graphics for a game to look good! take Zelda Windwaker, because of its style, it looks good even as a GameCube game. The problem with a lot of modern Pokémon games is that they half ass realism, creating almost an uncanny valley effect
There was a moment in the trailer where it transitioned from the game's style to the cover art's style (much more painted,) and I feel like there was a point in that spectrum where it *hit it.* I kinda like the style of the Pokemon Mystery Dungeon game on the switch.
Time is the biggest budget. People keep bringing up BOTW but also seem to wonder why it's sequel is taking so long. Almost like you don't get crazy graphics without basically being a once per generation project. (and BOTW2 confirmed to be using the same overworld, so "most of the work is already done" as they would put it... Yeah, that's not how it works)
@@raze2012_ Well, I wouldn't mind to have only 2-3 pokemon games for generation instead of 3 different pokemon games in just over a year. Just like any other videogame franchise does...
@@armandostockvideos8386 I'm sure many would. But pokemon, COD, and yearly sports franchises are basically the only projects that can not only stay yearly but practically guarantee 10m+ copies per main game. We'd see a lot more licensed games and spinoffs if other studios could get away with it. Instead most seem to have tried experimenting more on one big GaaS, GTA style. The only real difference is that COD works on "main games" every year staggered between 3 studios. Pokemon doesn't technically have main games every year, but instead 3+ spinoffs per year between the generations. The "main" pokemon games are technically 3 years apart because of that, but I guess people considering LGPE/BDSP/Arceus as main status is up for debate.
Besides poor texture quality and lighting issues, the game is absurdly lacking in detail and aesthetic sense. It looks like an early alpha because that's pretty much what it is; The game needed at least another year in development, possibly more. And if they are struggling due to an in-house engine, maybe it's time to start investing in an external engine.
Game was so hard to go through if you understand how lighting, shadows, yada yada works especially. The caves are the worst in my opinion with the white static around the models.
Yeah I randomly discovered the white static is actually an MSAA artifact and happens on default Unity projects if you dont disable their built in MSAA. It was causing my bloom in the elden ring video to freak the fuck out since the white pixels would appear and disappear and get bloomed.
Yeah, the white static on the models really got to me. Especially when Ingo was walking in the cave since it was so heavily pronounced around his black uniform.
The reason the shadow maps aren't baked is because the game has a dynamic day/night cycle, since the sun moves slightly each frame, the scene is redrawn to the shadow map each frame. The unfortunate consequence is that when trees are culled by the view frustum they are not being drawn to the shadow map. The solution is to cull based on distance to the camera when drawing the scene to the shadow map, and view cull when drawing the scene to the framebuffer / swapchain. They may have opted not to do this if looping all of the cullable geometry was expensive, or they might have just decided not to bother and felt that it wasn't something important.
Interestingly ambitious for a pokemon game. But it probably wasn't the best tradeoff. It probably would have saved a lot of resources in the lighting using some older trickery, like how Jak and Daxter in 2002 simply had 8 or so different lighting phases with a short transition to mimic dynamic environmental lighting.
My take on the graphics for this game (and possibly Scarlet and VIolet since the environments there also looks iffy): 1. Gamefreak needs to hire more people for environment design and rendering 2. The developers really need to be given more time, they've been releasing these huge games back to back and it's starting to show in terms of the quality
The water can actually be solved VERY easily using micro and macro variation It's also fairly low cost Essentially, Instead of using a single sized displacement map, you can make variations of it at different sizes and rotations, and layer them on top of one another It does a pretty fine job of breaking up the pattern at a distance
The thing that bugged me the most was the character textures. The clothes, and even hair of some were just terrible. Especially Adaman. I can't even look at him. Even of handheld they look bad. It's like they didn't realise that at some point you'd have cutscenes where you get closeups of certain characters and didn't think to accommodate for that.
I can assure you they're well aware of it lol Textures are tough because the larger they are the slower your game's performance and the file size of your game will increase exponentially
@@Acerola_t What bums me out with something like Adaman though is that he's a new character, in the third Pokemon Switch game they've created. They should have known their limitations by now. There was no reason to design him in a way that makes him so hard to texture well, within their limits. The Pokemon for the most part look good, the normal NPCs look alright, but then you get someone like him where they added all these details in his outfit that require a higher texture and look blurry or choppy, it just sticks out more. Especially when it's a defining feature like his hair or his jacket. Liam's clothes might not look great but you get drawn into his face and head with that goofy hat, and you don't really spend much time with this character anyway. Adaman shows up constantly and his most defining features are some of his worst ones. It sticks out much more. They should have done better.
They could've made a separate model with better texture (or just swap the texture), and use it exclusively on cutscene. GTA SA did exactly this and that was 2004, so there's no excuse.
@@Acerola_t yeah, but it's not like this game is some massive, unprecedently large game. There are games on the switch with more textures, higher fidelity textures, and made with a lower budget
4:47 I say: Don't do culling just based off of objects, do it also based off of shadows; so if the object isn't in view but the shadow is, don't cull it. ...if they can figure out how to do that
I'd really just appreciate it if Gamefreak hired some more people with the insane money Pokémon brings in so they CAN optimize the game and push the system to its limits without having it blow up in smoke I know BoTW had almost twice the development time but it really doesn't make me feel better when BoTW, a launch title, can have higher and more consistent graphical fidelity than PLA SV looks like it'll be better with the new 3D models actually made to be used without an outline on them and HOPEFULLY any cave sections will have the assets properly placed so I cannot see into the white void the entirety of the cave's map is sitting in
The thing that bothers me the most about this game's visuals is the extremely over-pronounced fresnel effect on everything. It just has that look of 'realtime lit unity game without proper reflection probes set up'
seeing the edited tall grass made me gasp, it looks so much better also, about the low quality textures: my issue is not that they exist, but where they are used. like on Laventon’s coat, there’s an EXTREMELY blurry Galaxy Team icon, despite higher resolution icons being present _all over the game_
To fix the disappearing shadows, how about making objects stop rendering by distance from the player instead of camera angle? Or just doing that only for the trees and tall objects?
Depends on the graphics budget. This and SwSh seem to aggressively LOD/cull it's assets, so maybe they legitimately couldn't handle it without tanking the framerate
Player-Distance could work. You could also increase the MeshRenderer Bounds to include the shadow (if the sun isn't moving maybe?) or give it an offset based on sun angle to avoid the culling when the shadow is in view.
I have hundreds of hours in legends Arceus at this point (I go outside I swear) and there are two other things I would point to as big visual issues, that I’m a bit surprised you didn’t talk about. 1, the absolutely dogshit render distance. I know you talked about the trees, but it’s not just that. Everything has that issue. Things will load in a few feet from your face, pokemon will make noises but not be visible, and the landscape forms behind you on braviary. In the literal first few seconds of gameplay, there’s a rock that loads in right as you walk past. The issue with the water happens to the cliffs as well. The textures either don’t scale well and look weird, or entire mountains will suddenly change how they look as you get closer. This sort of thing has been the biggest issue for me playing. Your note about the lake being the only issue with water isn’t true either. After braviary, almost all the water in the game has the exact same problem. It’s distracting and pretty ugly. 2, the drab colors. The most colorful area is the first one. And that area feels dull already. This might be just my opinion, but every time I looked out over the landscape it felt dull and kinda gross. The greys and browns are everywhere and the greens feel dead. Not to mention the mud areas look like crap (literally). The colors are so visually uninteresting and it made me frequently annoyed. So yeah, the game really doesn’t look great imo. Not to do the overdone thing and compare it to zelda, but like, dude. Come on. BotW is such a beautiful game. Even other games like Genshin Impact look wayyyy better. Even comparing it to pokemon, the map in USUM looked so much better. That might not be a fair comparison bc they aren’t open world, but legends isn’t either. You would think the area system would give them more room to make each area visually interesting and instead they’re all so boring. That’s just my opinion though. I think that people complaining are fully in the right to do so, because pokemon has the resources to do better, but they just don’t. Here’s to hoping Scarlet and Violet address these issues.
I think better lighting on the water would go a long way to making it look better from afar. It's weird that the glare follows the camera so much and that's so massive and bright.
Amazing video! what is really frustrating is the fact that some of this solutions seem really easy to fix at least for a game studio that has more than 10 people working on it. You make a great breakdown of this. thank you.
I feel bad for the developers of this game, cause they obviously put a lot of love into it! Even with the new style, it still feels like a Pokémon game, but not just *a* Pokémon game. I'm willing to bet that they wanted the game to look better, but were being rushed, leading to them focusing more of the game play and story. This would explain why the grass gets lighter at the bottom, maybe they planned to do something like what you mentioned, and made the grass lighter at the bottom so they could blend the texture color into it.
5:05 An easy solution would be to still render objects offscreen, but _only_ within a certain radius of the player, so that shadows within their view will still appear.
Lake Verity issue is actually pretty simple to fix: Use 2 normal/distortion map based on the distance to the water: One for when seen close/very close, and one for viewed from far away. Make it blend accordingly to the distance to the camera and you get a pretty good result
I thought about the detail map solution but it would have the same tiling issue, the water looks fine when viewed close up but for far away you would need an absurdly large texture to avoid noticeable texture tiling. Other comments have proposed the proper solution, stochastic texture sampling, which I was unaware of.
@@Acerola_t Oh yes! I completely forgot about this method. I used it once on a Blender project for rendering an animation. It's the one that "projects many textures on a plane and makes a kind of collage" effect to avoid tilling? Pretty clever!
@@Acerola_t An alternate solution that is frequently used is octave tiling, where you also just upscale the texture being repeated and blend, you can do this multiple times (i.e multiple octaves) and you get fine grain high detail repeating frequently with larger detail repeating more sparsely. This is usually sufficient to trick the eye because it does just enough to break up the repetitive patterns. This is also significantly faster than stochastic tiling.
I think the issue with shiny terrain is more to do with normal maps than it is actual specularity. When you have extreme normal maps, you can end up with pixels whose normals are facing away from you, or that have normals that are perpendicular to the camera. Normally this can't happen, so it causes weird shader artifacts when it does, which tends to make things look shiny even when they aren't
It's exactly this, there aren't any specular highlights in the terrain shader (or really any other shader in the game) and you can even see the craziness of the normal maps in one of the screenshots
Really great video! This shows what's justified about the criticisms of the graphics - sure it's not gonna look like an Xbox or PS game, maybe it's not even fair to expect it to look as good as botw, but the things you mention seem to be pretty easy to fix and they make the game look quite a bit better!!
Very pleased by how the vid approaches these topics. Usually in the Pokémon Fandom it feels like people tend to either love a game and deny any flaws or absolutely hate a game beyond reason, so its genuinely pretty great to have a vid that looks at the game's flaws and approaches it with a "Here's how I think they could've done better, but some of it is not so big of a big deal" point of view
Crysis did a lot of CPU intensive operations to prepare the data used to render its water. Unfortunately, mobile CPUs are horrible even compared to decade old desktop CPUs, so you'd be surprised at how limited you can be doing stuff on them. It's partially because later CPUs (and pretty much all mobile CPUs, for heat reasons) went multicore, but parallelizing some of these techniques is either impractical or doesn't actually get you faster results. We're just getting over that hump in the 2020's hardware wise, but it's still a common bottleneck. And the Switch is stuck with 2016 hardware. Maube next generation (if they are sticking with hybrid).
I really feel like I'm in the minority here, but the graphical limitations really ruined this game for me, I stopped playing after like 15-20 hours of forcing it... and it's not JUST graphics I care about (I put more time into Vampire Survivors for example) It really comes down to what they were TRYING to do vs. how short they came up. Pokemon only spawn in within like 7 feet of the character, so if you stand on a medium sized rock and look across the field, it looks like an early tech demo of the switch rather than a AAA game release -- almost nothing is rendered in the medium to long distance. I would have preferred the game got delayed a year and then released with more polish.
I haven’t seen a comment about it but I think maybe a reason for the grass being lighter at the bottom could be due in part to grass when sprouting tends to be lighter at the bottom. I’m not sure if this applies to every type of grass or only some but I’m growing some cat grass in a pot right now and it’s white when it first sprout then becomes a yellow and a green the higher up it goes, though it is very close to the dirt where the white and yellow are so it’s not as though the amount of light colour there makes sense especially in comparison to the height of the grass there. Side note: I do agree that your solution looks better
I know basically nothing about visual art, let alone 3D computer graphics. That's why it's so much fun to hear someone who DOES know break down why one of my favorite games falls short visually. PL:A was a blast to play, so hopefully Scarlet and Violet carry that over and look better to boot!
That was such a great explanation for me, a casual person with no graphics experience. I think if someone showed this to GameFreak they would fix the issues immediately and that would be amazing. I can only hope that they would patch the game so that it looks a bit better
I hear Japanese game devs kinda live in a bubble and don't want help from westerners or other Japanese studios. That's probably why it took Game Freak this long and the graphics look like ass. If they were given enough time and consulted with the studio responsible for BOTW, it would have been a better experience. However, my guess is that they would be counting on making improvements gradually every after their annual release schedule just like the other pokemon games before it.
Ha, you wish. All devs wish this. You don't really get to unless the game is a live service. But as of now that team is probably either crunching on SV or the inevitable DLC expansions after SV's release.
The tiling issue of the water is also visible when looking at the ocean, although it’s less distracting because at least you have a horizon to create some immersion
This game get's even more ridiculous when you consider the fact that CD Project Red made the Witcher 3 run on a switch and it looks awesome and can plays above 30FPS.
In defense of Game Freak, it was their first time stepping their toes on a third person action RPG, and had to develop the game and engine at the same time. I remember Valve had that problem when they were making Half-Life 2, where building the game and the engine at the same time caused plenty of delays for them. At least for the case of the Witcher 3 on Switch, since the game's complete, their only task is to scale it down to work with Switch hardware. Unfortunately, they had faced issues with Cyberpunk because there are too many new features in the game that their engine didn't handle before and had to be written during the development of the game.
"why is the ground so fucking shiny" is honestly the thing that put me off of Breath of the Wild for so long. When it's raining or the sun is at specific angles, the specular lighting is soooo distracting. I can't figure out why the art team said "yeah yes good that's what we want"
The fact that you clearly like Asano's work perfectly makes sence. Inio Asano is probably ma favourite mangaka, and i also like your content. Great video btw.
Stupendous video that introduced me to your channel. Love your design taste and in-depth knowledge! Subbed, and would love a continuation of this series
I'm fairly new to 3d stuff and this video answered a lot of questions i had about the game. i'd love if you delved deeper into the pokemon series. I see quite a few games on the switch with really nice lighting, shading and textures and then there's pokemon... (excluding snap and pokken tournament, which look great in comparison)
I love these video's where you teach us the right thing, instead of a whole tutorial about HOW to do it. You provide the WHY.. THere's a lot of value in combining that with humor, and you do that very f'ing good.
With the tree shadows they probably are still using shadow maps, but they're probably pre-culling the objects to the camera frustum, which is a very common mistake to make.
This is the first and only PLA criticism video I've seen that presents both an understanding of how games are made + genuine criticism + possible solutions in a calm and measured way, while not just dunking on the game completely. PLA is an excellent Pokemon game and I don't feel like the graphics take away THAT much from the enjoyment, so it's nice to see someone calmly point that out while also acknowledging that it does have some issues.
I would love to see an example of how Pokemon COULD look if modeled correctly. Obviously doing something huge would be very time-consuming, but an example of a single scene would be really cool.
A lot of the issues could probably be fixed by having a simpler, more cartoonish style (something akin to Wind Waker, though maybe not _that_ cartoonish) instead of trying to look realistic and failing because of low resolution and weird lighting.
I've been playing the game the past week, and I have to say the game is great and pretty entertaining, this is the first time I've ever played a 3D pokemon game and tbh the pokemon is what makes the game feel more alive, if there's nothing I can see why it may look bad, but it's not like the game is awful to the point of making it unenjoyable, I had really low expectations about the game, but I'd say it's actually pretty worth it.
I think the game should do random calculations to generate the water surface and look instead of using a texture. Sometimes things work better when using simulation.
Thank you for making a video that actually includes constructive criticism about this game. It's not the prettiest game on the switch but I'm getting tired of seeing all those hate and nitpicking videos about every Pokemon game since Sword and Shield. I'm glad I've finally found someone who criticizes those games on an objective and fair basis. This was very informative! Great job!
9:32 Uhmmmm.. Yeaaaa.... Jokes.. Aside I stumbled in your channel when I got curious about this same topic on why does BotW/TotK can render decent grass and foliage while mainting decent enough performance and resolution while Pokemon can't even be bothered. Your humour was really refreshing since alot of this stuff when explained can be really "Term-heavy" and can be boring for people like me who doesn't know alot about this stuff, but you explained it really well imho while keeping it entertaining. 👌
@@vivid8979 It's the unfortunate reality of being a multi media franchise. Games have gotten way harder to make, but pokemon still has multiple other release schedules that the games have to abide by like new seasons of the anime, new tcg sets, etc. In order to create a truly good game then the anime and tcg would have to be delayed by several years.
Great video dude I'm definitely subscribing! Tho the water critique isnt a cherry pic or nitpick And the textures in other Nintendo Switch games are much better Xenoblade 2 (2017) is a great example of that
Graphical fidelity is just one half of the equation. I feel like they could've made up for the lackluster graphics with solid art direction and environmental design, but the world just feels extremely drab and boring with little to no points of interest. It's quite disappointing on both of those fronts. It looks incohesive in terms of style; the character designs are cartoony, fun and colorful whereas the world design leans a bit too far into realism in terms of design-like it lacks a 'style' befitting of a pokemon game. I wish GF would take some inspiration from Genshin Impact's art direction/world design as I feel like they do a great job designing stylized, interesting and colorful landscapes that make you want to explore the world.
I noticed a spotlight on the lake while the camera was moving it made the lake more visible but also made the water look bad, if it's not necessary then simply removing it would help the issue.
Please do more, this was great and I subbed! This is what I've always wanted, for someone to break down why some games look awful from a technical point of view and suggesting possible improvements -- it's why I like Digital Foundary. But honestly, I _was_ expecting you to actually _implement_ those improvements and was waiting for either a mod for the game that fixed those issues _or_ a simulation/video editing to show the improvements. Other than the edited grass root gradient (which made the grass look 10x better already!), there's a lot to desired 😅 But thanks for making this, I just can't fathom how GameFreak can make such obvious "bad decisions" when you made that grass look so much better by literally just changing the colors.
My next video is going to be this same type of video for final fantasy xiv and I actually do mod the game to fix it, which is what I wanted to do for this vid but idk how to mod switch games lol Thank you for watching!
a solution ive found for the water texturing tile issue that works somewhat effectively is fog effects or depth of field, such that from far away the texture cant be seen as well when it repeats.
@@Acerola_t yes after watching the trailer I can say that grass looks good but issues might be possible with draw distance because there was not a good ammount of fog present in it
@@cleverman383 man a game with pokemon always becomes fun with time , this one is an open world and will have a multi-player system in which 4 players can connect , I think that there is nothing less in this game other than battle animations with comparison to LA
10:15 You sure it's unsolvable? why not just multi-layer the distortions, one small at the normal size, one medium, effecting say an 8x8 grouping of the small version, and one large, effecting the entire water body, that are seeded from three separate noise maps, or rng tables, or whatever it is that the source of the randomization is coming from. the second and third calculations could subtly mutate the first one enough that it doesn't tile identically when viewed en masse and while, yes, you're tripping the amount of computation needed to render water (or potentially cubing it if you're bad at optimisation and made the three calculations recursively call each other in parallel for each tile, instead of running in sequence from small to large and using a grid of multiple smaller outputs as the bigger input) but no solution is without overhead. a similar albeit less involved trick is used in some minecraft texture packs; they have the regular texture for a thing, several slightly different variants of that texture (rotated/mirrored grass in the post-redesign base-game texture pack for example) that occur at certain frequencies in a given chunk, and no two chunks randomize the texture (grass, dirt, stone) in the exact same pattern as any within line of sight of themself, unless you break the world generation with one of the rare Repetitive Seeds.
"No solution is without overhead". And this game clearly lacks the graphics budget for such overhead. Sometimes "doing nothing" is the best solution when you analyze how much this ACTUALLY impacts the game vs. the other 1000 bugs/issues filed, and how many more bugs a solution may cause. It sucks but I would probably make the same call in charge bchm I'm not IGN, so I won't pretend some bad water effect is a game breaker for me.
I'll go to bat a little for the grass. The WoW grass was meant to be seen but not noticed. The grass in PLA has a gameplay function, therefore it has an excuse to catch the eye.
@@AppleIPie Yes I do. The design of the character in the screenshot, and the thing on her back, is really distinctive. She was the antagonist of the Chapter 2 Season 8 event that flipped the island over.
about the UV distortion, is this the same thing jasper described in his video about Mario galaxy water? with the grays ale texture pulling and pushing pixels of another one?
I've got a question about that, if a pixel is being pulled or pushed away from its original location, what is this location filled up with? I tried implementing this in Java recently and most of the image usually looked fine, but it had a lot of black pixels scattered all over it because of these spots being empty
I overall quite liked the grapihcs of the game, but I definitely had some gripes. when I first saw the shiny pink on every surface in Obsidian Fieldlands, I thought it surely had to be a graphical glitch
Could you fix the tiling problem by having two 'layers' of the noise pattern? Apply one at the current ratio, then apply (optionally the same) pattern again at like 10x the scale, and the distortion should hide the tiling to some extent.
I tried really hard not to notice it, but the repeating water effect in the Cobalt Coastlands gave me such bad eye strain that I now avoid the entire area
I'm sure their shadows use the same technique as you described. The main difference being how they cull the objects drawn in the shadow map. The thing is, a directional light like the sun usually uses an ortographic projection as shadow, which has two problems: You need to specify where it begins and ends, and if the beginning is too far from the camera, you need to limit what things are drawn because many will probably not be visible on camera. The crude solution is just to put it some arbitrary distance away from the camera and call it a day. Which is a rather small distance when trying to run it with a very low spec hardware...
I'm wondering if using an out of step tiling effect for the water animation would work, where its neighbors on the right and left are a second or so out of sync. Then you play each copy at that time difference, so there's less apparent repeating patterns but only one animation
As the problem with water texture appears only afar, would it even matter if it had low resolution? If the texture is made to be viewed right next to it, wouldn’t it look similar if you are further away even if it was twice the size. You might say that “well, when you get back close to it, it would look awful” but if you are able to switch stock images of trees in place of actual models, would scaling a texture really be a problem?
