Tree Draw Distance / LOD Issues

To moderators: this is a factual description of what appears to be a bug and this shouldn’t be merged with other “LOD” discussions otherwise this valuable information for the developers might be lost in the noise.

This is my third post about the LOD questions:
LOD: settings and suggestions
LOD problems - Trees Fix Revisited
Facts and illustrated comparison between previous versions and v1.9.3 (SFO Feb 2020 vs Oct 2020)
Facts and illustrated comparison between previous versions and v1.9.3 (KOAK LOD Experiment)

Hi,

This is my next installment about the LOD problems in the simulator which I’m trying to rationalize in order to both help Asobo finding the root causes faster, if any, as well as to avoid judgements based on perception alone.

First let me try to explain what it is about: the simulator is dividing the aircraft surroundings in concentric circles and the farther away from the center, the less resolution and objects are drawing. This is a normal optimization. However if the rings are too close to the aircraft, the visual appearance gets degraded, because the rendered object or texture doesn’t match the optimal size/resolution it could display at. The possible visual defects could be:

  • Melted buildings with photogrammetry, because they are displaying closer to the aircraft a level of details supposed to be rendering farther away.
  • Low resolution ground textures when seen from above, because again they are displaying closer with a level of details supposed to be rendering farther away.
  • Low definition 3D models, again for the same reasons.
  • etc…

Usually the distance between a ring and the next is double the distance of the previous one (exponential), which makes sense I guess because of Pythagoras:

| 0m  LOD0  D m |  LOD1  2xD m |  LOD2  4xD m | LOD3 8xD m | etc...

In this post, I’m trying to measure what are the various LOD ring distance in order to find whether they could be too small and tightly packed, therefore causing visuals degradations too close to the aircraft. And I think I’ve found a problem with the LOD ring distance calculation.

First let’s start with the screenshots. There are 2 series of screenshots measuring from drone view the distance to the ground until the texture changes to the lower LOD.

Using Terrain LOD 100%:




Using Terrain LOD 200%:




Comparing the LOD distances:

LOD 100%: | 0m LOD0 75 m | LOD1 150 m | LOD2 300 m | LOD3 600 m | etc...
LOD 200%: | 0m LOD0 105 m | LOD1 210 m | LOD2 420 m | LOD3 858 m | etc...

Analysis:

On one hand, FS2020 is using the exponential LOD distances like I’ve explained above, this is ok.

However on the other hand, FS2020 is using LOD distances which are not reflecting the Terrain LOD multiplier, and I believe there is an error there: when using Terrain LOD 200% I’d expect LOD0 distance to be 150m, LOD1 300m, LOD2 600m etc… effectively doubling the distance from Terrain LOD 100%.

Now if you look closely to the number and make abstraction for imprecise measurement given the tooling, you find out:

Terrain LOD 200% = 1.4 x Terrain LOD 100%

as a reminder: 1.41 is the square root of 2...

Conclusion:

  • I believe there is a bug in the FS2020 code using the Terrain LOD % slider not as a percentage, but as a square root of the percentage which is unexpected.
  • It is possible this error is spread out to some or all other code using the Terrain LOD value.
  • I can’t compare with pre-release LOD distances because I’ve never measured them.

If this is a programming error, this could explain:

In addition, I believe even at Terrain LOD 100% the distances rings are too close to the aircraft and are reducing the rendering quality very fast a few meters away.

I’d recommend instead using the current (Terrain LOD 100% x 2) as the actual LOD 100% at a minimum. This would give more pleasant details immediately while also supporting zooming in a little without degradations. It won’t introduce any rendering performance problems either because users can still lower the LOD settings with the slider in order to make it the same as it is today (in this case we’ll use 50%).

If the chosen LOD ring distances are a chosen to accommodate the XBox version because the XBox hardware is measured as less performant than most PC simmers are using, then I’d suggest you use 2 different set of values: one for XBox and a different one for PC. If however XBox is proving in your test being superior to most PC simmers are using, then it won’t change anything because we can still reduce the slider if needed (but we can’t raise it past 200%… which really is 141% today)

Please vote this topic so that it gets higher chances being in Asobo’s radar as quickly as possible

I’m filling a Zendesk in the meantime and I hope this will be of any help!

[update] filled as: Request #70848 Terrain LOD distance is using the square root of its value.

[update2] for those wondering why Asobo is taking so much time with bug fixes, you have to realize they are receiving a lot of Zendesk and this takes time just triaging. In looking at my last 2 reports (68719 Oct 16 14:32 and 70848 Oct 25 14:15) you can deduce they have received 2129 request during this time. If they were treating all of them over the 5 working days in this time span, there are about 426 request per day to read, analyse, answer or dispatch!! If they’re working 8h a day, this is nearly 1 request per minute… This should put some of these numbers in perspective.


[UPDATE 14FEB2021]

I’ve posted a new series of screenshots showing further showcasing how LOD distance might be wrongly computed with a 1.41 factor (square root of 2)

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Hi all!
Requested from the devs, we have merged several Tree Draw Distance / LOD topics.

If your post was one moved into this topic, you may re-cast your vote if you like. This topic is on their radar though!

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That may seem reasonable to make it more manageable, but it has also reduced the vote count meaning it’s lower down on the list. Of course people can vote again but many won’t see this and so a lot of historical votes have been lost.

This issue has already been pushed back to su6 or 7. You say it’s on the devs radar, but can you give us any assurance that it hasn’t lost any of its priority? For a lot of us this is a serious quality of experience issue.

1 Like

Some mod or even community manager wrote after 1.14.X (for it showing the lowest draw distance yet) that it is being investigated and worked on, though the updates show a very different picture. It sure was worked on but in the most opposite way possible, of what those describing and reporting this issue would want with their comment on it.

Community: “this looks awful and emersion breaking! Please revert or make it mod-able”

Asobo: “we hear you, hence we reduced it even more and cut out any possibility to change it with a mod”

We can all speculate of what the cause of this might be, if it’s either that the tail doesn’t know what the head is doing, or other things, money making things like Xbox release (or introduction of military sh*t into the civil flight simulator)
But what I and I guess many other take from this is probably more like “Asobo couldn’t care less”
The fact that they stated claims on that developer video while showing a valley in front of a mountain range WHILE showing that old bugs of floating lights where reintroduced as well, is very frustrating if not concerning.
And the Scandinavian Update makes it even worse. Is just plain sad

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Our only hope is that it looks just as bad on X-Box, the console players are extremely sensitive to bad graphics, and will make themselves heard on social media and Youtube if they see trees popping up in front of them.

Hi @Uzura2203,
Good question!

The merging of these topics came from Jorg and he said they are monitoring it. That’s pretty much all we know from that point.

As far as votes on this topic, it wouldn’t matter like other topics. This topic has been marked for watch and can’t go any higher than Jorg. :slight_smile:

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I really wonder since when it is monitored that way up?
The decrease of visual quality is most apparent since 1.14. and mods said it is under Investigation, though what happened was that it got worse from there on…

Please keep the discussion in this topic solely on Tree Draw Distance / LOD
Thank you!

There are SO MANY threads about this issue, it is confusing to figure out which one is relevant for current day issues. It is no longer correct as is stated in the OP that the issue has been fixed by third party. Asobo hardcoded the sim not to let third party addons adjust the tree draw range anymore.
Further more, there now seems to be an issue with the tree draw distance the further from equator you go. Up in the north countries the tree draw distance is MINISCULE, and it looks absolutely terrible. I live in Norway, and I used to love fly there, but now I try to avoid it as much as possible because of this issue!

Asobo, please fix the hardcode you entered into the sim so that 3pd can make addons for this as before (tree fix addon). Also, please fix this issue once and for all by adding a tree slider that lets you max out by the horizon.

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As the OP, I can say that things have steady declined in regards to draw distances. On Dec 23 a 3dr party gave us trees as far as the eye could see with little or no impact. This problem was fixed in grand fashion. But unceremoniously, this has been steadily ripped away from us update after update and to make matter worse the epic denials that have gone along with it. I could fix it now. Roll back the trees to DEC 23, apply the 3rd party patch and you’ll have trees as far as the eye can see with little on no impact. Now what in blazing tarnation’s is the problem? ASOSBO?

Cheers,
PACO572

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Tree draw distance in Norway in particular is terrible - this needs to be resolved.

Add a tree draw distance slider - unblock 3rd party modification - resolve code bug with tree draw distance affected by latitude distance from equator - resolve bug in lod distances… any of these would be nice. Thanks

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It’s a total disgrace. The graphics have been constantly downgraded since release. It’s not just trees its everything, terrain, textures, buildings, even the clouds are worse. I have no idea why they have done this but it’s made me so angry. I used to get a wow moment every flight I did, just doesn’t happen any more.

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Consider Captain Lucky’s october remarks again… something went wrong with the LOD slider scaling, I don’t see any effect on tree distance between 50 and 200. It seems to be clipped for some reason, affecting mountains AND tree distance. Hot fix candidate, if you ask me…

It is not only Norway. I checked Amazon river as well, tree distance is the same. How awful this looks. Below I show a forest in Sweden, east coast. There’s supposed to be trees about 100 miles around this spot. Top picture I took with LOD-50, picture below that was LOD-200. I posted a video today, I see forest about 2-3 miles of trees around my aircraft. LOD settings does not matter, find the difference…

Terrain LOD-50

Terrain LOD-200

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For me it looks like this from 50 to 200 (Near EDDF Frankfurt Airport):

Terrain LOD-50

Terrain LOD-100

Terrain LOD-150

Terrain LOD-200

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The thing I genuinely don’t understand is why this thread has been merged so it can be ‘monitored’ by the dev team.

This issue is so obvious, so widespread and so widely reported on these forums that I would have hoped they were well on with a fix for it by now. When they said they had sorted this problem with SU4 I genuinely wonder which game were they playing/testing, because the one I’m playing didn’t change one bit with all the relevant settings maxed out. For the avoidance of doubt, there is a circle around the player aircraft where the graphics look great. Beyond that the scenery, and very obviously the trees, just stop(s) dead. What you’re left with beyond this scenery draw bubble looks like a game from 20 years ago.

It would be really neat to know that this serious issue with the graphical fidelity of the game has been not only noted or ‘watched’, but is being actively worked on. Right now there should be no other graphical issue that takes precedence over this. This needs sorting ASAP.

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Solution of this issue is easy. Just add 3 sliders:

Draw distance of objects
Draw distance of trees
Draw distance of textures

So every player could tune it’s sim how he wants and every player could make decision how much performance is he willing to sacrifice. And please, do not cap maximum value on 1.5NM as set in current state…

I have been in gaming industry for years and honestly, I still don’t get how Devs can ignore LOD issues (which are #1 reported issue, just shattered across topics) for more than 9 months. If I was leading game development this way, I would be unemployed in few weeks.

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Agree with all that’s been set above.

I think if the devs have any respect for their user base, they need to release this as a hot fix/patch sooner rather than later.

Even just giving us a greater tree LOD back improved so much more as it helps to mask cutoff of buildings or where ground textures begin to not be as sharp.

When you reduce tree LOD to the extent it has been reduced, so many other things become obviously poor as well.

Do the right thing devs and listen to your user base.

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i was flying above london and again felt like the lod around here (especially the non photogrammetery part’s in the distance) was also worse then before.

so i found an old video from after the wu UK release on my pc. Thought i’d made a quick comparrison and find out what the difference in LOD really is between update 3 and update 5. Well, i have to admit that at this specific location nothing has changed in terms of LOD.

Ofcourse i’ve seen screenshots from earlier updates etc. and also i know for sure in some places the lod has gotten alot worse. (especially the nordics region after update 5) So i’m definately not saying that the lod downgrades arent true. But after seeing my own findings in this comparrison i really have to take into account that maybe part of the downgrade we see, are actually not downgraded at all.

Here’s some screenshots:

taken from video. see date: 2021-02-22 just after wu3 i think?

this was from today.

The red cirkle is the furthest building wich i could see (aprox) and below screenshots i’ll show you some simple measurements i made with taking 2 points and find them in google maps and measurering the distance between. Notice the train tracks, running track etc for location. I’m almost 100% sure the white building in the distance is the building next to the train tracks on google maps.






I’ve seen some speculation that they’re waiting until after DX12 but that still doesn’t explain why they nerfed the previous tree fix which worked wonders and with no real FPS hit.

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This is a major issue that needs to be addressed… I’ve been lurking here for weeks waiting for some good news on the topic and I’m getting more concerned by the day…

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