Quote from Scawen :

Well... no, the new idea is that at full LOD you shouldn't get any visible lod popping. And if you turn off the multiplayer speedup option, you shouldn't get visible lod reduction even if there are other nearby cars all over your screen. I'm trying to make this work for everyone.

Remember, I have now removed totally, all lod on tracks and trees because it's not needed. The only lod is on objects where lod has been specified (e.g. tyres and cones) cars and humans. As a developer I can't allow the total removal of LOD, it would be just crazy to draw a distant car which takes 5 pixels on the screen, with several thousand polygons. The aim is to set the lod correctly so that at Max User LOD, you don't see lod popping.

These last couple of test patches are all about lod and that's why it's gone on a bit, the lod system needed a big overhaul because it was all out of control and not giving control to the user. Now it's supposed to be simple, let the user control it and not let fov and screen resolution control it automatically in confusing and unpredictable ways.

Another reason why it may seem to have gone on a bit is there are so many different configurations.

But actually to me it doesn't seem to have gone on long at all... it's just like anything else, it takes a while to get right. LFS graphics have come along a bit these last few days, even without any of Eric's actual updates which are in development.

Thanks for clearing that up! I'll just carry on then.. Excuse me while I continue to enjoy LFS and the patches! Sorry for all those still experiencing a few hiccups.

Since this is LOD related. I shoot for the highest visual quality without any discernible mesh swaps, and am fortunate that I still can get 75 (+?) FPS with vsync enabled, but I still often see little details swapping such as hood pins disappear as distance from camera grows, a building that has some flicker/ z-fighting.. I am running at 1600x1200 at 75hz on a larger screen, but I don't want to use a smaller screen to avoid seeing these though, heh.

Is it conceivable to shoot for no visual mesh quality degradation before this patch? While testing this patch? or should I expect some noticeable swaps? I am completely on the maximum visual quality, big muscle PC side of things.

Thanks and Magnificent work!

Quote from Mister2zx3 :

Is it conceivable to shoot for no visual mesh quality degradation before this patch? While testing this patch? or should I expect some noticeable swaps? I am completely on the maximum visual quality, big muscle PC side of things.

Well... I'm about to release V6, I guess in about half an hour. It should be better, but your LOD will be back to 0.8 again. When you get it, just put your LOD back up to 1.0 and I'd be pleased to hear if you still get LOD issues. Some things will definitely be better but you will get some popup regardless, for example there are disappearing fences at South City and probably some other tracks, and things like this can only be fixed with a track update, because the "optimiser" in the dev version has been improved as well.

You will probably still see clips on the car bonnets vanishing but that should be less visible than in older versions, at maximum LOD. Problem with those is I'm not drawing the car's subobjects in an efficient way yet and those cause a surprising amounts of slowdown. There is scope for improvement there.

So far no probs with the test patches here, just getting used to the new LOD settings. There was one thing that threw me for a couple of days though. Is the Mip bias being reset to default 2.0 with these test patches? I noticed my GFX got very "shimery", until I put the Mip Bias to 0.0. I cant remeber what I use to have it set at before the Test patch with the LOD changes.

thanks, and looking forward to T6

Hello. I'd like to point out the new V6 test patch!

http://www.lfsforum.net/showthread.php?t=21721

Thanks for the feedback on V5. I'll now close this thread.