Building Pop Up

[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.