Tree Draw Distance Fix with WU4

Where can I find your Alpha/Beta results?

Hilarious how the narrative has now switched to… “it was best during the beta” now that the mythical release version has been shown to be worse than the current one.

Trees are definitely drawing out further and blending in much better so there is far less apparent pop up.

Also please stop lamenting the tree lod hack. It was taking advantage of a wierd bug /oversight that allowed large objects to be rendered further out.
A 200m tall variant of each tree with a impossibly small spawn chance was added which forced all the normal sized variants to be drawn out to the distance the giant tree would have.

It made no sense and was probably an oversight asobo are well within their rights to fix, maybe for memory optimisation, maybe it’d cause issues with something coming later, who knows…

Now there is a known issue with lod radius reducing at the extreme latitudes but that is a different story.

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You should go to a flat area, not necessarily in mountains…this difference really comes out.
Not sure what you meant by 1237710, and we all know that the sim has grand potential…and I am still “pulling” for the sim.
Yes, your screenshots look great, BTW.

You can use publicly released Alpha/Beta pics instead:

Does it matter if it was a “hack”? I mean it worked…

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But it worked on the basis of a bug, innocuous enough to you and I, but maybe it caused issues we are not aware of or was seen as low hanging fruit for optimisation.

During beta they were probably tweaking this to gauge performance etc, regardless they eventually settled on the draw distance we see at release, likely hitting a sweet spot for visuals vs performance.

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It worked by modifying a single tree type to be super tall because some how the tree draw distance was linked to “the tallest tree in the forest” (to paraphrase Monty Python). Even though mods that exploited that oddity worked fine for most of us, it clearly was not a desirable situation to have random super tall trees in the scenery database.

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I sometimes wonder if there is a low rendering / memory way of faking trees in the extreme distance… Maybe some sort of localised noise map or something?

Because that’s essentially all you saw at extreme ranges anyway.

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I did go to a flat area in my second post. The improvement is very visible there as well.

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For me, flying over flat areas (lets say the Midlands of the UK) and hilly areas (Scotland) are like playing different games.

Over the flat, it is obvious where the detail ends and you’re left with a blurry low res texture to the horizon. That’s on Ultra & 200 LOD.

Whatever and however, that needs addressing.

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The mod that this Bjian guys sells for the shy amount of 20+ bucks is not working anymore?
That’s about 1/3 of the base price for the game. Feel sorry for all the users who bought it.

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While I may not agree with the price he’s obviously put a lot of effort into understanding and tweaking the vegetation xmls for multiple seasons which is the main reason I bought it.

I wish there was a similar quality free alternative but unfortunately I haven’t come across anything yet.

I can’t really go back to the default trees after using it, the added diversity and colours really improves the look of the world.

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Please Asobo, can we have an update on the state of tree draw distance after WU4 in todays development update? Does Asobo

  • consider the low tree draw distance issue as solved,
  • will there be a hotfix because the intended (according to the changelog) modification is missing, or
  • will it be cured in a later update?

Thank you.

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But I don’t think it is missing:

Then the answer by Asobo should express this and a lot of people are plainly wrong.

I’m not sure I have good comparison shots from the release version (but I’m tempted to search my archive) but I am pretty sure tree draw distance doesn’t go further now than before WU4 - as was claimed in the changelog.

The release notes are most likely missing this one: :grinning:

Unmodded, I think it is better now than pre WU4, and (as I’ve shown above) certainly no worse than release back in August. I’ve got some some recent shots I can dig out to do some comparisons of pre/post WU4 and will see how that looks later on.

Edit - realised this is a pointless exercise as, of late, I was using the tree mod - although have that turned off now - so I have no recent un modded screenshots

A slider for the user to choose a LOD scaler for different scenery types would be appreciated. Then it’s up to the user to decide if they accept the lower performance or not.

Trees and buildings should have separate sliders at the very least, and need to go out another 5x to satisfy the power users.

Even terrain is popping and changing LODs at < 100m from the object.

This is with trees at ultra and no mods:

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