Right now, even with Terrain LOD set to 400 large cities quickly disappear in the distance. Approaching JFK airport, for instance, you get none of the Manhattan skyline until you are within about 10nm of it. You can land in Philadelphia’s NE airport without even seeing the city.
Large buildings (or even just large cities) should always be visible at a very low LOD as landmarks for VFR flight and to help with overall immersion in the world, much in the same way that you can see lower detail terrain features far off in the distance. Even if the skyscrapers are just replaced by boxes set to their footprint and height when at a distance, it would be a huge step up from looking towards a major metro area and seeing nothing but fields.
Exhibit A: Manhattan. The island, not the city, apparently.
[EDIT] I was just adjusting settings in the sim and noticed that the Dynamic Quality (?) setting can greatly effect the distance of cities and other ground detail. You still need to have the Terrain LOD set quite high with it turned off, though; I settled on about 300 to see a low-detail version of Manhattan from the position in the attached screenshot.
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Just ran across this thread, I’ve been looking for a thread on this subject to add my thoughts on this.
I don’t know if this is possible, but I would like to see the draw distance of tall buildings (skyscrapers if you will) tied to the terrain itself (mountains, the landscape). All other scenery objects would remain within the current TLOD scenery system. Setting high TLOD to have skyscrapers visible in the distance as you approach would not be necessary, and satisfactory TLOD could be set to lower numbers as a user’s hardware and visual preferences warrant for best performance.
Since most cities buildings are PG now I don’t even know if such a solution is even possible or how you would implement it, but it sure would mitigate the issue of city skyscrapers popping in as you get close at a distance dependent on your TLOD mute.
Just a thought…
If I remember correctly, in FSX the decision about the visibility of an object did not depend on the distance but on the number of pixels of the display. So you could say that an object should not appear below a certain number of pixels.
‘This had the advantage that an object did not flicker, but could be shown stably when it appeared, regardless of its distance.’ (I don’t know how else to express this last sentence.)
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