Growing Trees

[stafforj]

First apologies for the long post, just felt I had to say it all:

I've been playing with the Grow Plants slider, and I cant make any sense of it.

I want to model what my garden will look like with some extra trees added.
So first I add the existing trees, these are all mature, ie 25 years old,
so I pick mature ones from the plant library
Then I add new trees, I pick young ones from the library.
OK, 3d view shows big existing trees, and small new trees.
Now I set grow trees slider to 0 years, and click OK, Now all my mature trees have become tiny!

OK, so now set slider to 10 years, some trees grow, some dont.

Whatever I do In cant make any sense of it.


I expected to be able to pick a tree/plant and set its age as of today, then add new planting, and age the whole lot together.
ie if I have a two existing trees, one 10 years old, the other 15 years old, and am planting two new 2 year old trees,
I expect to set the slider to 5 years and see what everything will look like in 5 years time,
which should be existing trees then aged 15,20 years, and the new trees aged 7 years.


Also why do we have to pick young/medium/mature trees from the library ? I understand that scaling up a young sapling to a mature tree wont give realistic results, so an image of a mature tree is needed,
but I would expect the program to automatically pick the correct image for the trees age.
i.e the program should scale the young image for tree age 0-5 years, the medium image for tree age 5-15 years, and the mature image for age > 15 years.

As an alternative to setting plant age now, we should be able to set plant height now, from which program could compute its age, becuase I can easily measure the height of existing plants/trees, but guessing there age is difficult.

I was already dissapointed by the range of plants in the library (although I was intending to get the Bonus plant library),
but this growing thing is awfull.

Can anyone explain how it works, and the logic behind it.

PS: I've only played with trees, it may work better for small plants.