I think you might catch a butterfly or two in some games, but it's rare. I agree these nature environments often feel totally dead in games. Same with nature sounds. Devs usually get a bigger boner simulating wind and contact physics on each individual blade of grass (like this blog post does in part 3, of course).

> Have there been any games that tried to include species diversity in their grass?

Minecraft, if you squint?[0] Obviously that's not any kind of graphical fidelity to real grass though.

[0] There's a couple of variants of grass which is then tinted to reflect the biome you're in. Some of the terrain mods add a bunch of new grasses ("betternether" springs to mind)

I would rather recommend this video [1] from SimonDev. It is much more enjoyable to watch. But all of these explain the exact same approach of rendering instanced geometry, with wind dynamics made in vertex shader.

I used this as reference to implement an infinite grass world in ~300 LoC of Lua and GLSL.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bp7REZBV4P4 [2] https://github.com/jmiskovic/grassland/blob/main/grass.lua