I think it looks significantly better.

If you want the forest to feel more dense, I'd make the trees 1/3 trunk, 2/3 leaves. But that might make it harder to see the player or whatever is happening on the ground.

Thanks, I'll give that a shot.

The player and other entities ghost through occluding objects, so that's fine.

Here's one-third trunk and two-thirds leaves: http://puu.sh/lkeX0/765eb995dc.png

I think it does look nice. I'll probably do a mix, and make the leaves vary.

(note: shadows not yet corrected in that shot)

I'm a big sucker for forests as well. I think that the trees themselves look really good, but the forest itself looks weird because every tree is almost the same size, it looks unnatural.

What about making some trees taller, others wider, others with a lot of leaves, others with only a few, and so on? That could be achieved using smaller "pieces" to generate the trees: in the case of the trunk, having small trunk pieces, so you can generate a trunk of any height putting pieces together, and in the case of the leaves, having small leaves sprites and putting them at random on top of the trunk.

Of course you need to generate the shadow using the same approach, and that complicates things a little bit :/

I'm not too worried about the shadows not being exactly perfect - if the forest is heavily wooded enough, I don't think people will notice.

Right now I intend to color-shift the tree tops to add variation, and also move the tree leaves up and down the trunk, giving different sizes (and scale them too). I also have some other species of trees I made yesterday - I was going to use them to "theme" different sections of the forest, but I could sprinkle some of different species in each forest, even while theming each forest with a predominate species and predominate color.

Those trees look fine. I see an old pine out the window that looks just like the ones in your 2nd batch. For variety you could add deciduous trees, as wide as they are tall, leaves green or yellow-orange-red or fallen, or flowering in springtime. If you're going for a mature forest, the canopy blocks out all the light so there's no undergrowth, just dead leaves on the ground. Except an occasional clearing around fallen tree(s) or water surrounded by grass and/or brush.

You might be better off showing just the trunks. I mean, I don't really notice the leaves 50+ feet above when I'm in the woods. It's almost like a cathedral.

P.S. looks aren't everything... 2d rpgs ftw!

Thanks gents, I definitely appreciate the encouragement and feedback!

I'll try to draw some deciduous trees. (Hopefully I can draw them better than I can pronounce them!)

I definitely need a better forest floor, and I think some light-rays coming through the trees might add to the atmosphere as well.

As others have said already, new trees look much better in the forest. You can move your old trees to the french garden near your castle :)

deciduous = dee sid you us :)

Also some shadow along the right side of each trunk will help, and a highlight in the middle of the left half of each trunk will also help make them look like they have depth.

Dee sid you us, thanks - that helps, I'll tape that to my monitor and hopefully memorize it.

Here's another go at the shading: http://puu.sh/lmUOG/b40ff0e766.png

I'm not sure if I fully captured what you were saying about the left-side highlight?

The trunk-to-ground transition also needs work, but I think I can tackle that some other day after I get a better forest floor.

[b][Edit:][/b] Here's even stronger shading: http://puu.sh/lmWbB/0c501f753d.png

The one above the guy's head looks very good. :) The bottom left one could use some more highlighting, and the three pale ones from the bottom middle to bottom right could use more shadow. The one to the left of the guy has too greyish of a highlight, try a little yellow or reddish. The tree on the top right is pretty good, but don't forget the top part of the trunk behind the branches needs some shadow too. Similarly the one on the top left looks good on the bottom half of the trunk but needs more highlight and shadow on the top half.

BTW if you have access to any Bob Ross videos, he does a great job at very quickly creating trees with shadows and highlights and needles or leaves, with only a few smears of paint.

maya, or speed tree (and probably others) have 3d tree creation tools. You could make thousands of tree gifs fast that way (add a lil wind animation). This would add a more realistic feel to your game

But honestly your perspective is off (unless you are going for cabinet view) you are painting them to strait up and down :) and take your treelayer copy it then add a 15 - 20 px gaussian blur to them and then set that behind the tree with a alpha of about 10-30% this will make them feel more blended with the terrain (the px size is based on the image size. it should look more blended so that the trees dont pop out as much form the terrain.

Thanks for the suggestion! I'm not familiar with cabinet view, but this is the camera angle I'm going for:

(pardon the poor outdated graphics)

Given that camera angle, do the trees still look off?

I'm not good with 3D modelling tools. I was trying to figure out how to do wind; wish I thought of using Speed Tree for that, though Speed Tree isn't free for commercial use.