Building Pop Up

[=XIII=Shea]

Pop up is very annoying when bombing from high alt

[B25Mitch]

IN DCS: Black Shark, there were some objects that faded in as well as some that popped up.

BUT

What that meant is that if you used the Shkval targeting screen to zoom in really far, you'd see a mess of half-faded buildings and other objects, which is terrible when you're trying to spot camourflaged units in the midst of them.

[CharveL]

Pop-up objects are a byproduct of the compromise between performance and visual quality for game programmers.

From what I understand objects are generally very cpu intensive for keeping track of where they are in the virtual space and because flight sims offer such a vast, visible area at times, drawing objects out to the end of visibility could encompass tens of kilometers. Fly over a city and you can see how things get out of hand, yet we don't want to limit view distance over countryside where a few buildings here and there may be well within available processing power.

Back in the day the only feasible way around this was to have less objects and as many objects "baked" into ground textures as you could get away with. The vertex and pixel shaders in newer video cards helps out and allows more or better quality objects but CloD really pushes the limit to make a believable cityscape so we are still butting our heads up against the limits of technology from what I see in the videos and screenshots.

With that said I also get the impression that Oleg and team have added quite a bit of personal control over video options including viewing distance for objects so it is also likely we will also have the "fade-in" objects at that perimeter as well like some other games have incorporated. I have no idea what the hit on resources is for that but I'm also hoping Oleg has tuned the LOD's to strike a good balance between performance and visual quality.

Bottom line is most of us will have to make some compromises even on newer systems. For me a minimum framerate over 40fps is the least I can handle so I may consider dropping the resolution below my native 1920x1080 and making up for the jaggies with AA since I will likely have more spare video card headroom than CPU (i5-750 overclocked to 3.8ghz which ain't too bad) then tweak the other video settings accordingly, but we'll have to wait and see.

I suspect CloD will run half-decently on even lower spec systems with enough concessions on effects and video quality, especially over the channel. Mark my words it will be flying at 1000m over cities that will kill you.

[Skoshi Tiger]

Originally Posted by CharveL

I suspect CloD will run half-decently on even lower spec systems with enough concessions on effects and video quality, especially over the channel. Mark my words it will be flying at 1000m over cities that will kill you.

Luckly most of air combat over smoggy old London will be at 20,000 feet (roughly 5300 odd Metres). Hopefully enough of the buildings will have popped out to give us a good frame rate!

Cheers!

[CharveL]

As for the real topic in this thread, you know, the one about Tree not his valid topic, he's simply figured out the same thing that RayBanJockey and a few others figured out here years and years ago.

You don't catch flies or get noticed by Oleg with honey.

Mixing in a bit of crap goes much farther around here.

[Heliocon]

Dont pull the - graphics cant handle it bs. thats a lie.

If they had an iota of sense they would make building at a distance simple boxes with roofs, and have a very low res texture on them. As you get closer the LOD increases, and then they either have more LOD switches for less and less detail, or tesselate the buildings based on a second model from the first LOD switch. This means there would be no popping at all, and only 1 real model would need to be made (and houses are really easy to make, its what you do as a first project, however towns are a bit harder and I dont know what exact system they are using for that...).

In any case LOD popping completely eliminates immersion. I cant believe the rediculous opinions on this board when people obsess over the contrast or brightness of the terrain/land, yet the fact that buildings suddenly spawn into the word where before there were none is hardly argued over/mentioned. Its one of the MOST important graphical features, and can easily be handled by any modern computer (even low end ones). The amount of rescources needed to load buildings at a distance into memory is near nothing, they have very little geometry and at a distance low textures (which should increase when you get closer, but no point in highres textures if you cant see them!).

More and more there engine is coming off as inneficient, badly designed and planned it seems to me. Who knows it might be fine in release, but with the current pop it looks absurd.

[CharveL]

Originally Posted by Heliocon

Dont pull the - graphics cant handle it bs. thats a lie.

If they had an iota of sense they would make building at a distance simple boxes with roofs, and have a very low res texture on them. As you get closer the LOD increases, and then they either have more LOD switches for less and less detail, or tesselate the buildings based on a second model from the first LOD switch. This means there would be no popping at all, and only 1 real model would need to be made (and houses are really easy to make, its what you do as a first project, however towns are a bit harder and I dont know what exact system they are using for that...).

In any case LOD popping completely eliminates immersion. I cant believe the rediculous opinions on this board when people obsess over the contrast or brightness of the terrain/land, yet the fact that buildings suddenly spawn into the word where before there were none is hardly argued over/mentioned. Its one of the MOST important graphical features, and can easily be handled by any modern computer (even low end ones). The amount of rescources needed to load buildings at a distance into memory is near nothing, they have very little geometry and at a distance low textures (which should increase when you get closer, but no point in highres textures if you cant see them!).

More and more there engine is coming off as inneficient, badly designed and planned it seems to me. Who knows it might be fine in release, but with the current pop it looks absurd.

Dude, just...go read up on the stuff before trying to make comments about things you don't really get. I mean, you know some terms and what they're supposed to do but not how they work together collectively. You might as well give us your insight into nuclear physics since you read a wikipedia explanation about half-life (hint: not the game).

[TheGrunch]

He's still right, though. The solution to building popup is just to create even simpler LODs. How much are a few hundred 16 tri buildings with 16x16 textures going to tax a modern GPU? Not much.

[Heliocon]

Originally Posted by CharveL

Dude, just...go read up on the stuff before trying to make comments about things you don't really get. I mean, you know some terms and what they're supposed to do but not how they work together collectively. You might as well give us your insight into nuclear physics since you read a wikipedia explanation about half-life (hint: not the game).

Charvel, really stop before I start using caps : http://forum.1cpublishing.eu/showthr...795#post233795

I have little programming experience, but know a good amount about game design (from multiple sources, did a bit with Digipen) have a few years experience with Maya aswell. Now there are plenty of things I do not know about, and I always preface my post with that (for example compared to others here I know very little about flying and tactics, engines or plane mechanics, much of the wars history or even things like HOTAS setups). What I do know about is computer hardware and software, and enough about graphics design and engines that I feel confident in the comments I make. Like said I did a good amount of graphics design in Maya (7.0 then 7.5) which was bought out by Autodesk (the only other major competitor for CGI and game model/graphics) and while I would have to wiki to check now, I believe autodesk scrapped their autodesk app, and now Maya autodesk is really only used (maybe opengl is different, not sure on that one). Anyway I used the exact same software they are using for the game.

For the record the link is my "victory I told you so post", where I layed out many features and uses of DX11 and opinions on how it should be used/how they will use it along with comp hardware about 5 months ago-1month ago. Ironically during that time a dev himself said they were only thinking about tesselating "plane wheels" and forum members said dx11 decreased performance. I had been arguing for tesselation to reduce workload for modeling details and remove the need to LOD and multiple models to reduce popping. I also talked about using direct compute for physics modeling for flight and for water/particles, along with dx11 shader pipelines being much more efficient on mutli core machines and that they should aim for that. People like you dismissed it, just so you know- Then we had that nice new interview which nearly point for point repeated every single thing I had been saying (and getting responses like you made to me) for months and months (2010). Now I probably should not have dragged this out, but if you have a particular point I made in my post you would like to contest, thats fine with me. Until then, dont reply with that bs to my post, because I have a paper due and I am not in a good mood

Wall of text over, continue

[kestrel79]

Originally Posted by =XIII=Shea

Pop up is very annoying when bombing from high alt

This is what annoyed me most with pop up in IL2. I spend all this time in my B25 getting up to alt and then I cannot see the buildings I'm suppose to target until I'm right on top of it looking down the sight. By the time I move the rudder and let the sight settle it's too late.

I hope this gets improved in CoD.