Growing Trees

[Dan Park]

It looks like there is a discrepancy in the growth when a slider is placed directly to 0. Try placing the slider slightly over 0 to see the effect.

Also there is a setting in each plant that states what it's starting age is. If you lower the slider below this age the plant will not continue to shrink. If you edit the plant so that the image is smaller than the starting age it will grow but then when you move it back it won't shrink all the way.

We used a simplistic algorithm to show this so that you can easily return the plan to the original state. Check each of your trees and see what the starting age is. This will determine how small the plant will get as you slide the slider to 0. The height at maturity controls how tall the tree will get. If you were to size the tree larger than maturity and then start using the slider the plant will likely shrink in size at some point causing confusing results.

Your suggestion of having different images for different aged plants is a good one but is more complicated to produce and is more than our underlying system can handle at this point. It is something we have logged in our database for future development.

[stafforj]

Dan,
A few more points:

The age at maturity cant be set to more than 20 years!
So according to this, a Oak, or Giant Redwood is mature at 20 years!

I can accept the gwoth slider only having a 20 year range, as I dont really want to look more than 20 years in the future, but having a limited maturity age means iether the groth rate for slow growing trees must be wrong, or else that you cant have such trees older than 20 years old.

For a landscaping product I find these limitations unacceptable.


Some of the points I have raised are surely easy to fix (Im a software engineer myself), so is there any chance of a fix for these problems in the near future. The two main fixes I would like to see are maturity age > 20 years, and being able to grow trees on from their current age, ie start with trees aged 3 and 6 years, set groth slider to 5 years, and see trees aged 8 and 11 years.

PS: are the same problems in home designer pro 7.0 ?

[Dan Park]

I have filed the problem with the limit with our engineering department. It seems rather arbitrary to limit the aging of plants to only 20 yrs when most houses can be there for much longer.