Here is a better rendition of the previous screenshot. I may do a better one with the do_antialias (good for screenshots, but not ready for play) extension, though I like the flame in this one. The flame animations are not normally synchronized afaik, but those two pedestals they seem to just happen to be so. Funny, twice when taking the screenshot the flame disappeared. I've never noticed it do that... though I suppose you might not notice unless things slowed down. Weird either way.
I took care of the major artifacts in the previous image by adding a lodbias setting to the images key. Only one level (-1) was necessary to fix the grass and the tree. The grass seems a little too sharp, but better than having disembodied portions. I think it may be possible to do multisampling (sub-pixel sampling) only for specific objects (versus fullscreen) which may be more practical than doing everything... you'd still incur the cost of a fullscreen copy (with D3D9 anyway) and allocating multiple depth buffers... but at least you would not be rendering everything 4 times or more (more or less) ... anyway, I think that's about the only thing that would really help the grass at a distance. Still I think the colorkey textures are pretty effective / in most cases the way to go for delicate filament like features.
Something like this might look nice in the Gamefaqs (gamespot) gallery if there's nowhere better to hang it. Just don't tell anyone it's the product of major league hacking
PS: It's not a bad concept shot for Trismegistus either. The NPC in the background I think Tom never meant to be visible. He's not there anyway when you walk over to that side. He adds to the overall mysteriousness kinda, and in the screenshot anyway (if you let your imagination run wild) could even fill the shoes of the player character (from a 3rd person pov) almost being watched by "The all seeing Eye of Horus"
EDITED: I notice a little speck under the tree leaves. Dunno if it's actually something, or a stray texel from the leaves. Photo edit it away and clone tool the cut across the tree top out, and you'd end up with something close to perfection (by Som standards)
