LODS and Draw Distance

Yeah, optimization is probably the most important and most boring phase, at the same time, and you see lot of modders bypassing that aspect for one reason or another.

As for the LOD available ingame it does sounds not really helpful, because LOD is present for every single .GMT in the scene. Doesnt matter you set it up or not, it is there with default value. Changing LOD at root level means the entire scene will LOD out at that arbitrary number you pick via settings, producing some crazy random visual with everything popping in and out. This is because LOD is calculated on object pivot and all objects that are part of merged assets (basically the majority) will pop in and out without any real optimization value. At the opposite, random LOD may introduce serious frame drops. For example, if you have a group of buildings which are covering an area of 1000mt^2, with pivot centered, you will get all buildings popping out when that pivot has reach the distance you pick in the arbitrary LOD out value, that's even if you have one of these buildings just in front of you.

LOD has to be set properly, isn't really an overall number you can apply to everything.

 

Yeah, that's why I wanted it to be a customizable MAX, not effect all GMTs with lower value...

Selected MAX LOD: 4500

10000 >> 4500
7000 >> 4500
3000 >> 3000
250 >> 250

As an example. On a side note, I have asked, wished, requested sonething like this for MultiView side monitors long ago, not sure if possible, but noone needs to render objects 5km away on either side. Easy FPS boost right there.

Edit: just re-read and understood your argument, but that's always a possible downside with giving people options, not everyone understand how to use them properly. But a modder should split such big buildings into smaller parts.

 

Doesn't the track detail setting adjust LOD by some percentage? Or change the LODMultiplier in the camera files?

 

The 10.000 meters thing is because is the default value of load-out from Gmotor Tools for 3ds Max and, incredibly, many content creators let it alone untouched.

It's a torture to fine tuning a track to optimize the driving view trying to balance from FPS performance and avoiding objects popping out in screen.

I don't believe a in-game bar controlling load distance would be desirable, the ideal condition would be track makers take care of it when modelling.

BTW, one thing would be great: boxes instead of circles to load-in / load-out objects. Sometimes you have a 1000 meters long straight and you're forced to use load-out values about the same 1000 meters, but it's a circle radius, which means the object will be unnecessarily loaded across all track. If you were allowed to use a box clipper instead of a fixed radius circle, you could see that object for 1000 meters in straight (X axis of box) but 50 meters across (Y axis of box) (for example), unloading that GMT when you leave the straight and improving performance.

 

The track detail only show / hide objects if the track creator properly set GMT visgroups when modelling. It has no influence on lod values.

This is why there's no sense on talking about FPS performance mentioning the "track detail set". It's completely up to the content creator. If the visgroups are not correctly set, it makes no difference from low and full track detail. The objects loaded are the same. Same thing goes to shadow groups. If track maker didn't take care of those values, there's no difference from low to full shadows in-game bar, the objects castering shadows will be the same.

 

Laziness is the virus of the century...it does affect all people in general.

We did gJED for that reason too, other than to avoid people to be forced using 3DsMax as 3D modeler.

With gJED you can set, realtime, LODs, VisualGroups, and everything stored into GMTs. Thanks to gJED I've been able to optimize our Historic Belgium '67 because lot of assets has been lost in an HD failure. Using gJED to set LODs is way easier than using Max, or 3DsimEd, as you can "drive" in the middle of the road, and use that frustum to set object LODs, while you are moving. This saves tons of trial and error, or going nuts using dummy circles in the scene to check ranges.

So, I think we should all be less prone to post-workarounds (which are most of the time making things worse) and ask modders to optimize their tracks. We've been asked for years to make easy tools to do these things. Today we have that tool. Let's use it.

Set LODs into gJED, export .GMTs. Done.

 

Agree. Shadows groups and Visual Groups (and Mirrors!) are sometimes even more important than Lodding, especially with low end cards, where usually you kill your VRAM before you reach a drawcall and/or a tricount bottleneck.

 

I used to alternate rF2 window increasing LOD values to the objects popping up as the car was doing a lap. This was quite time consuming.

I wasn't sure if this was possible with GJED but since it is, I will certainly use it for visgroups, shadowgroups and object LOD in the future.


I don't have my laptop with me so I cannot check things like:
- if a slider is used to edit the values for LOD
- lf there is an option to set actual distance as lod out.
-If there is there a key to show all objects regardless POV? This could be very useful to know if you need to increase the LOD values of some objects instead of waiting them to pop as you move around the scene.


Enviado desde mi ONE A2001 mediante Tapatalk

 

This is already sort of happening, anyway; this is where frustrum culling comes into play. Anything whose bounding box outside the view will be culled before being sent to the rendering pipeline. Also, the driving view isn't the only way that objects will be viewed, there's also trackside cameras, mirrors, etc.

 

Yeah I think in racing sims with limited areas it's usually the most efficient solution that track maker optimizes track LODs manually. Games with large areas like GTA V handles this a bit differently. It seems GTA V has an automated LOD system: at far distance (like from a helicopter) it only shows large objects like skyscrapers. Then as you get closer it will render smaller and smaller objects to view. This approach would allow a universal viewing distance slider, which is called "distance scaling" in GTA V. But I reckon I haven't seen such a slider in any recent racing sim.

 

Hello. Sorry to bump old topic but what first line do ?

ClipPlanes=(0.50, 1500.00)
ClipPlanes=(0.50, 150.00)

I mean 0.50. I understand that 1500 is meters and when i have terrain far away from track it start blinking. Also can i change only one line ? For example 1500 to 4500 and for mirrors i need to type 450 Instead of 150 ?