oky so majority of us got tree "issues" laaging the graphicscard and even giving logging in issues on server whit a high tree count.
stumbeld upon a (in my head , brilliant) idee when flying over my 3x3km's peace of virtual land to solve this!
so tree stumps take up memory and even get calculated in the server data on there age and status ect.
why not just keep doing that exactly, tree's get planted and grow, let them grow and die aswel.
high quality tree's live longer than low quality tree's and it wil give a nice realistic cycle upon cleaning up serverdata.
tree gets planted - grows to full age - lives x time - dureing its time it repoduces x amount of new tree's - it has reached its age limit so it doies - tree falls over as if it would be chopped down - stump and log lay on the ground for x amount of time - log and stump vanishes cleaning up data.
for the new tree spawns i would let tree's of Q9 and lower just spawn 1 tree of Q10. over time this would mean u would have no more tree's of Q10- so other tree's would have to randomly spawn those low quality tree's in order to keep the diversity in quality.
this entire system wil need (i think) ALOT of attention to fine tune and see how the forest grows/develops so yeah at start it wil be messy.
for the treestumps,
let the stumps just be on a general time no mather what quality the tree was, lets say 5 day ingame cycle? (just random number here)
so a tree that "dies" or gets chopped down the stump wil be there and no mather if the player that chopped it down is to lazy to clean it up , eventualy it wil go away.
AND if the player is to lazy to clean it up, it wil be in his/her way to expand his/her land considering game mechanics dont allow u to build on a stump, placing a new tree? not posable eather, so not removing the stomp gives u delay for planting new tree's.
the logs,
depending on the quality of the tree the log degenrates over time in amount that can be sawn out of the log.
in addition to counter this, i would inplement it so that the log's that are dragged into buildings (buildings like canopy and/or warehouse's) to keep there amount of usefull wood or even slighlyt increase the quality/wood amount (over x amount of time as if a tree was growing) that u can get from those log's that are stored underneath a roof.
storeing or ageing wood was done and stil is (bhut ALOT less nowadays) and even for such long periods that it was being dryed for the next generation, its becouse it was dryed so long that a table of those day's stil is flat and unchanged in form.
compared to the table u made from the tree u chopped down past summer and thats why the table looks like a banana right now (yep u dident let it dry so now u got a banana replica instead of a table)