LOD Problems - Distances revisited

No, you we have this issue in normal gameplay as well. Never seen the same thing on ground (maybe because the different options), but in the air when other planes are passing by. In some cases have to rotate the camera to see a company

This is pretty common in computer graphics, often noticeable in scenes with fog where objects at the edges of the screen are more visible than the centre. Simple explanation…

The blue dot is the same distance from the camera, but because the distance is measured to the centre of the frame rotating the camera can mean the difference between it being inside and outside the drawing threshold. I guess it’s more noticeable in VR vs 2D due to the wider FoV.

It’s probably computationally impractical to take this into account and calculate all distances ‘correctly’, rather the models should be set up so the switching isn’t noticeable. For example in this case it would be fine if the front landing gear switched to a lower detail instead of disappearing completely.

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I agree with you and thank you for the illustration.

AFAIK, FS2020 is selecting the model LODs based on euclidian distance only though, and in this case, the same LOD model should be displaying regardless of the angle.

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Like what is this? all data on and sliders at max

Typical terrible MSFS draw distance, not fixed after more than half of year… And some still say “there’s no issue”… :frowning:

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After careful consideration I have determined that this message may be in violation of the guidelines, so as a precautionary measure it has been removed.

msg 307551/38

Some related info for a bug discovered today for objects. You mention 5 days ago about the ‘squareroot’ scaling. I discovered this too (without seeing your post) today, but numbers seem logarithmic I thought (100=1.0, 200=1.4, 50=0.7) (I could be wrong, could just be exponential). Furthermore, LOD is purely distance based. It has nothing to do with detail or quality. Increasing Object LOD makes the object appear bigger to the sim and based on minimum stock sizes it changes the distances it is being rendered at based on the minSize parameter (or 0 if not specified).

The bug is the way MSFS decide when to load the model, and it does that incorrect before a model is loaded with scaling transforms in the GLTF. (I have no idea if this has any effect on terrain LOD though, hard to test without known data)

https://forums.flightsimulator.com/t/poi-very-late-rendering-draw-pop-in-solution-for-asobo-to-fix-in-this-thread/368281/28?u=dronkeyklong

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Good job on the analysis! I’ve been complaining about this for 9 months now and I feel like Asobo still didn’t even acknowledge this as an issue. It is literally the main reason why I am still on X-plane. I mean, sure FS looks great if you are close, but I want to fly airliners and not look at mush all the time.

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After careful consideration I have determined that this message may be in violation of the guidelines, so as a precautionary measure it has been removed.

msg 307551/41

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To add some data measurements for a straight flight over London at 500ft
Basically higher terrain detail means a wider cone gets downloaded

Terrain 200 4.38 1.60x 100 LOD
Terrain 150 3.49
Terrain 100 2.73 1.72x 50 LOD
Terrain 50 1.58

Also in data, doubling LOD, doesn’t double the data consumption.

The difference in RAM usage maybe explains the LOD factor behavior, loading London City Airport
Terrain 50 17.8 GB allocated
Terrain 100 19.8 GB allocated 2 GB more
Terrain 200 23.8 GB allocated 4 GB more

Might just be a coincidence, but the extra memory needed does seem to double.

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seems like ASOBO got one closer to the ultra low LOD youtube video…

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1.14.6 and Norway Bergen to Sweden Gardermoen looks like this (LOD 200)

This is kind of the idea I was after with Cheat Engine and editing the game configs in realtime from memory. With SimConnect it would have beem possible to even create a simple program to adjust the LOD according to altitude and also weather (visibility).

Personally I’d like to see something much closer to LOD1000% when flying airliners at FL200+.

Currently it seems though that a lot of these kinds of ideas are no longer possible to achieve since the updates have changed the way stuff works.

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Of course true graphics quality and videogames-are-an-art connaisseurs enjoy the best, uncompromized “un-FPS-optimized” visual quality and best eye-candy possible.

But imagine what would happen if graphics quality would enhance over time with patches:

The rest of the 50% of playkiddies are so much louder than the rest and fully connected everywhere and have 500 friiieeennndddzz to influence, and they start to scream and yell around everywhere (forums, YouTube, everywhere on social media) “after the last patch I have only absolute UNPLAYABLE slow and stuttering 999FPS on ultralow with my GeForce 910 but 8 gigs of single-channel RAM should be enough in 2021 told me my OEM PC vendor, LULZ ROFL the flight simulator is the biggest sh!!!t ever made nothing else ever is worser and this bad game is so uuuunoptimized, by the way when will the flight sim be released as smartphone game I want to play it mobile!” - and the programmers and developers must follow the orders of the stupid sheeple who are in control.
The developers are literally forced to magically bring even more and more frames to the table even for the most slow computers.

That`s why you will notice graphics downgrades and even more annoying and intrusive and immersion-breaking LOD pop-ins everywhere literally “popping out” of nowhere over time with every new patch that get´s introduced.

But that is not the root of the problem - the true problem ist, that the maxed out and ultra settings are significantly downgraded too for no reason!
I personally have no problem of downgrading the graphics for the potato PC masses, but for god´s sake keep the ultra settings on ULTRA and don´t downgrade the ultra and max settings too :wink:
These are called “ultra” and “max” settings for a reason, Flight Simulators should be the pinnacle of technology like it was for decades - and not being optimized and downgraded long enough until ultra and maxed out settings run rather flawless in non-city-areas on some Radeon 460 4GB and Ryzen 3 1200.
New graphics card and CPU generations don´t get engineered and released almost every year for no reason.

That`s why it annoys me when the ultra and highest settings, which should be future-proof settings especially reserved for powerful machines (and I am sure many fellow old-school pilots have build a new computer especially for the new FS2020) and for new hardware generations are significantly downgraded more and more over time.
Instead of keeping ultra untouched and ultra to the max.

In the meantime, please enjoy this updated version which eases the LOD problem for true graphics connaisseurs a little bit:

Fasten your seat belts and enjoy the new enhanced greenery.

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Perhaps LOD related, but I noticed something yesterday that I don’t think I’ve ever seen before.

I was flying around the LOWI area, following the valley, and landing at strips as I went.

When on one grass strip, covered in snow, I noticed that ahead of me was a stretch of grass with no snow at all. As I taxied forwards, snow started to appear on those parts, as if the snow was only being drawn in my vicinity. After takeoff, I looked back, and the entire stretch of grass had no snow at all.

I’m sure it hasn’t always been like that.

I’ve noticed the same thing yesterday, but it was in VR (therefore with a lot of “medium” graphic settings) and as I only started VR last week, I can’t tell if it is a new issue or not. But yeah, snow on the roads/runways appeared only when very close to me.

I think it’s a sphere, as elevation shows the same effect.

Need help!
Where ever I try to change terrain LOD in usercfg , it resets back to default settings without me changing? where as I edited and changed, saved
Any help

After you save the usercfg you need to right click the file go to properties and set it to Read Only. This should prevent the sim from overwriting the saved file when you launch the sim.

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Yep, I am absolutely furious with the graphical downgrades. I saved up for a long time so I could build a top of the range PC for this sim. When I first got the sim I was blown away every flight, just stunning. I don’t get that any more, it is just not as good as it used to be, extremely disappointing to say the least.

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