Now on to Norway. I will be comparing the Lustrafjord (second video) and the Lofoten Islands (second video). Comparing at LOD 25 (same as the old videos), while the morphing is still rather terrible, it’s a little better than it used to be. In the Lustrafjord, those huge transparent areas with trees that morphed into completely new mountains seem to be gone, and at the Lofoten Islands, the terrain seams and some spikes that kept appearing and disappearing also seem to be totally gone.
Based on some of the texture consistency issues I saw at lower LODs, I believe that Norway is unfortunately victim of the LOD bugs that plague scenery at extremely high latitudes, the same issues that make flying over Svalbard, much of Alaska, and the entire Antarctica extremely unpleasant. To this day, Asobo’s workaround is to “select another location”, so once they take this issue and the coastline glitch seriously I think Norway will be quite improved overall.
Same videos at LOD 400. Still quite bad, especially compared to the improved Matterhorn area, but I’d say more tolerable than before.
I think we can conclude that, in order to rush these World Updates out of the door, they compile the new data in a very hasty way that does not properly scale down to the lower LODs. Eventually the data will be recompiled correctly, but at a very slow pace. Hopefully it won’t take too long for Lord Howe Island and Gibraltar to be “fixed”…