Please fix this annoying LOD bug in the next patch

[jermin]

No matter perfect landscape or excellent landscape I play in, I encounter this LOD bug in game. Any single piston engine fighter, no matter friendly or foe, will become barely visible at the range approximately from 500m to 1000m, especially on my 12 o'clock or 6 o'clock and will be visible again once within 500m.

When the problematic aircraft is on my 12 o'clock, I can "fix" this problem by entering gunsight view, where I can see it clearly, although I have to have an idea from which direction it comes from in the first place. But this trick is unavailable when it's on your 6.

I guess that the bug is caused by the airplane surface reflection effect whose original purpose is to make the aircraft glows at a certain angle and distance. But due to the outdated graphics engine, the aircraft merely blends into the background, making it disappear.

Thanks to this bug, I don't know how may times I have lost the bandit in my windscreen and on my tail in icon-off servers.

I have tried setting the object lighting to flat, switching to excellent mode, trying different screen resolutions, playing with different AA and AF settings and trying different video card settings. But none of them fixed the problem.

I've had this problem since years ago when I was playing on a comletely different PC. So I don't think it's an individual phenomenon.

Dear TD, would you please provide an option to completely turn off the reflection effect on the aircraft?

[jermin]

Further discovery: Fw-190s and Bf-109s don't have such problem. The problem usually happens on allied fighters. But I am an exclusive Luftwaffe pilot. So this puts me in a very bad disadvantage during air battles.

[EJGr.Ost_Caspar]

1. This is not only happen to allied fighters.
2. This is not far from realism. In fact I still find it too easy to keep track on planes above the ground. How do you think, a Split-S maneuvre could ever rescue any evading pilot, if it was well visible above ground? Thats what camouflage was made for.

You problem is, contrary, the unrealistic visibility of the 'dots'... so called. There is no fluid transition between the dot and the LoD system. A solution were to make more LoDs, but this is unlikely going to happen with the sheer mass of planes in game.

And last but not least... this is not a bug, just because its unhandy for you (and everyone else).

[jermin]

No. It was indeed a bug. There have been numerous threads on Ubi forums talking about this LOD bug ever since AEP came out in 2004. And someone has even given a solution - adjusting intellisample settings, which, unfortunately, are unavailable for today's Nvidia cards.

Please look at these threads for more information:

http://forums.ubi.com/eve/forums?a=tpc&f=23110283&m=5921060163 (solution given in page 3)
http://forums.ubi.com/eve/forums/a/tpc/f/23110283/m/1091000033/p/1
http://forums.ubi.com/eve/forums/a/tpc/f/23110283/m/5581020063

Instead of making new LODs, can we use adjacent LOD for that problematic LOD? And I've rechecked in the game. 109s and 190s don't have the LOD problem. I'm using a GTX 295 on driver version of 280.26 (updated yesterday).

And about the realism of current dot visiblity. The dots are already too hard to see for me under 1920 x 1200 screen resolution. Aircraft in distance is only a tiny black dot. Though once I go back to 1024x768, it is true that the dot is too easy to see. Actually I think block is a better name here. But this still doesn't solve the invisible LOD problem.

Can we make it that no matter what resolution is used, the dot will always occupies 4 pixels on the screen? Thay way the dot visibility is fair for all players using different graphics settings

[EJGr.Ost_Caspar]

Ok, we'll doublecheck, if that is really a bug. However, the only problem imaginably is with single LoDs of special planes, not general. We will see.

Thanks for the links.

[jermin]

Thank you very much!