Building Pop Up

[Skoshi Tiger]

Are there any flight simulations out there that popup building don't happen in?

At least the trees aren't turning towards you as you fly past them like in ROF! (Of cource the Developers might like Hurons out of LOTR!)

Cheers!

[Robert]

Originally Posted by Skoshi Tiger

Are there any flight simulations out there that popup building don't happen in?

At least the trees aren't turning towards you as you fly past them like in ROF! (Of cource the Developers might like Hurons out of LOTR!)

Cheers!

that's a feature. The Ents are joining the battle

[=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.

[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.