How to increase draw distance?

[[TWB]Pand]

I've recently made changes to my terrain.ini file to allow for minimal blur on the horizon when zoomed out, which has been invaluable in regards to navigation.  I'm currently using the "10 lines of texlod=4096x8" configuration from this thread: http://forum.il2sturmovik.com/topic/12501-you-also-think-bos-beautiful-how-about-making-it-absolutly-g/page-6?hl=%2Bgorgeous&do=findComment&comment=245417

 

I'm looking to make additional improvements.  While the changes above are night and day, when zooming in, there is still a very noticable range where the trees and detail disappears (and layered blur is added back in).  This is especially tough to overcome when trying to to identify and distribute ground target assignments to my flight.   

 

Is there a different configuration that would allow better rendering of this?  Or increased distance of the bubble?     Thanks!

 

Edited April 3, 2015 by [TWB]Pand

[coconut]

I once took a look at gpresets.ini, which is found in scripts.gtp. It's interesting to see what each preset uses. IIRC, the draw distance increases with the quality: shortest for Low, furthest for Ultra. Try Ultra and see if that works for you, and hope your hardware can handle it.

 

(and for those interested, changing that file and putting it under data/luascripts did nothing).

[wellenbrecher]

Having playing Balanced on my old PC and Ultra on my current setup (three cheers for unchangeable AO!) I have to admit I don't see much of a difference in draw distance.

 

It probably is really noticeable in direct comparisons in screenshots right next to each other, but in regular play it looks pretty much exactly like what Pand posted up there for me. And going by the trees I wouldn't want to best on that NOT being Ultra either.

[361fundahl]

I'm on ultra and my framerate is great.... I would like to increase draw distance with slider as in arma 3

[6./ZG26_Emil]

I have been working on a few co-op style missions which have IL2s in them, I had to fly it from the bombers point of view to test and this draw distance problem is really horrible when you are down low and zoom it searching for far off contacts.

[[TWB]Pand]

To clarify, I am running 1080p on Ultra, and smooth as silk -- which is why I am wanting to increase the distance as the hardware could/should be able to handle it.

 

Note the screenshot I took is at FULL zoom.  Thanks all!

[TG-55Panthercules]

I hope someone can figure out something to help with this.  This is probably the main reason I can't generate any real interest for flying BoS any more.  I like to fly ground attack, and spend most of my time down low looking for targets, and that bubble of blur effect really kills any immersion or interest for me, especially knowing that with these dadgum locked graphics presets there's little hope of being able to adjust things to get rid of it.

[71st_AH_Mastiff]

my game crash's when I attempted this. it would not load.

[BlackDevil]

I could live very well with a further out line of blur as well. Either a draw distance slider or an improve Ultra setting would be nice.

[coconut]

my game crash's when I attempted this. it would not load.

What did you attempt?

[Urra]

 

I've recently made changes to my terrain.ini file to allow for minimal blur on the horizon when zoomed out, which has been invaluable in regards to navigation. I'm currently using the "10 lines of texlod=4096x8" configuration from this thread: http://forum.il2sturmovik.com/topic/12501-you-also-think-bos-beautiful-how-about-making-it-absolutly-g/page-6?hl=%2Bgorgeous&do=findComment&comment=245417

 

I'm looking to make additional improvements. While the changes above are night and day, when zooming in, there is still a very noticable range where the trees and detail disappears (and layered blur is added back in). This is especially tough to overcome when trying to to identify and distribute ground target assignments to my flight.

 

Is there a different configuration that would allow better rendering of this? Or increased distance of the bubble? Thanks!

 

Along with the setting above I enabled MFAA on my 900 series card last night. it does feel like like improves things a bit when you're up high@2-3km. Have to test a bit more as I was enjoying the server too much and stopped paying attention to the ground. It definitely doesn't hurt anything.

[-TBC-AeroAce]

Im pretty sure that DSR improves this a bit if u have NVIDA card. There was a whole thread on it

[71st_AH_Mastiff]

What did you attempt?

when I add 10 res entries.

[wellenbrecher]

The ten lines thing crashes the game when you start the editor. Every single time, apparently.

Personally I never had a problem with it during regular play.

 

Did you update the number at the top to reflect the ten lines as opposed to the old five?

Edited April 8, 2015 by wellenbrecher

[Venturi]

Increasing draw distance is one of my biggest wants in this game.

 

If a player's got the hardware, then he/she should be able to take advantage of it.

 

If players decide they want more draw distance, and want to take advantage of higher settings... and then they get the hardware... they will then be even more committed to flight simming and gaming.

 

Which means they will be more likely to buy the next IL2 expansion.

 

Think about it.

Edited April 9, 2015 by Venturi

[71st_AH_Mastiff]

The ten lines thing crashes the game when you start the editor. Every single time, apparently.

Personally I never had a problem with it during regular play.

 

Did you update the number at the top to reflect the ten lines as opposed to the old five?

yes so I lowered it to 9 and it worked lol.

[Picchio]

Im pretty sure that DSR improves this a bit if u have NVIDA card. There was a whole thread on it

 

Let's not create confusion: the resolution you set doesn't have anything to do with the engine's LOD system or its draw distance capabilities. You can downsample (and toy with DSR) as much as you want, it won't make a difference.

 

OP: you might wanna check here: http://forum.il2sturmovik.com/topic/12501-you-also-think-bos-beautiful-how-about-making-it-absolutly-g/?p=251659

Edited April 9, 2015 by Picchio

[[TWB]Pand]

That's an excellent post; however, I'm trying to get the 'bubble' to extend further than it is, and these settings don't appear to change that.

 

[Urra]

Wasn't there a show on scyfi channel where the people in a town somewheres were trapped in a dome and couldn't get out? They lived in a big bubble.

Edited April 9, 2015 by roaming_gnome

[avlSteve]

I get close to a googol FPS on ultra running 10 lines of 8192 and need that bubble to get gone.

Edited April 9, 2015 by avlSteve

[=LD=Penshoon]

That's an excellent post; however, I'm trying to get the 'bubble' to extend further than it is, and these settings don't appear to change that.

 

Ysp04tH.jpg

No that won't change the tree & object render distance, only the ground textures. 

 

The render distance of trees and objects are linked to your FOV and your gfx present.  Zoom in and stuff render farther away, zoom out and that bubble border gets closer to save resources. I actually get higher fps in biggest FOV than in smallest FOV which is the opposite from other games with configurable FOV. 

 

I think it sucks big time that we can't configurable this ourself but at the same time I'm afraid many users would just set it to zero to gain a spotting advantage online. I know when I played WT that you could set the game up to look like [Edited] but you could spot a million times better that people playing with higher settings. Maybe we can help come up with a compromise?

Edited April 10, 2015 by Bearcat
Profanity

[wellenbrecher]

Well keep in mind that Gaijin are really weird when it comes to common sense solution to exploits like that.

Like, for the longest time people could simply turn off the clouds with the right settings. Giving them an immense advantage.

They have the exact same problem right now with their tanks and they can't seem to understand how to fix it. As in, when you turn your settings down far enough, all the little bushes and whatnot disappear, reducing effective visual cover to zero. And that's not even mentioning what the lack of shadows and lighting does to cover.

Easy enough to fix, has been mentioned since Closed Beta, but Gaijin's gonna Gaijin all day err'day.

 

Similarly, there are solutions to the problem you mentioned. Such as defining a minimal render distance at a reasonable distance (say current Low settings) and uncoupling the plane render distance from the other settings to name two examples off the top of my head.

Edited April 10, 2015 by wellenbrecher

[6./ZG26_Emil]

No that won't change the tree & object render distance, only the ground textures. 

 

The render distance of trees and objects are linked to your FOV and your gfx present.  Zoom in and stuff render farther away, zoom out and that bubble border gets closer to save resources. I actually get higher fps in biggest FOV than in smallest FOV which is the opposite from other games with configurable FOV. 

 

I think it sucks big time that we can't configurable this ourself but at the same time I'm afraid many users would just set it to zero to gain a spotting advantage online. I know when I played WT that you could set the game up to look like shit but you could spot a million times better that people playing with higher settings. Maybe we can help come up with a compromise?

 

Right except they could easily have a minimum setting couldn't they and it would stop people doing that.

 

Like people used to turn off trees in CLOD.

[TG-55Panthercules]

These kinds of discussions really get to me every once in a while.  As a primarily SP type, the notion that we're being denied decent/better graphical solutions or settings options because some of the MP folks might use them to "cheat" or distort the MP scene would be rather galling if it were true.   Talk about the tail wagging the dog - if (as seems to be said fairly consistently) there are tons more SP players than MP players, why should such MP-related graphical concerns be controlling what's available for SP players?

 

It's not that I don't understand the concept of how letting MP players monkey with graphical settings could let them gain some sort of unfair advantage or why MP players would be concerned about that prospect - I would be concerned about that too if I were playing MP.  I just don't understand why SP players should be penalized or lose out on potentially good graphical options because of those MP concerns.  Would it really be that hard for the devs to make those settings so that they would work only in SP and not in MP (or maybe make them settable/overridable by the MP server operator)?

Edited April 10, 2015 by TG-55Panthercules

[VBF-12_Stick-95]

These kinds of discussions really get to me every once in a while.  As a primarily SP type, the notion that we're being denied decent/better graphical solutions or settings options because some of the MP folks might use them to "cheat" or distort the MP scene would be rather galling if it were true.   Talk about the tail wagging the dog - if (as seems to be said fairly consistently) there are tons more SP players than MP players, why should such MP-related graphical concerns be controlling what's available for SP players?

 

It's not that I don't understand the concept of how letting MP players monkey with graphical settings could let them gain some sort of unfair advantage or why MP players would be concerned about that prospect - I would be concerned about that too if I were playing MP.  I just don't understand why SP players should be penalized or lose out on potentially good graphical options because of those MP concerns.  Would it really be that hard for the devs to make those settings so that they would work only in SP and not in MP (or maybe make them settable/overridable by the MP server operator)?

 

These are not cheats at all.  None of these settings affect spotting of aircraft.  All they change it viewing terrain better in the distance, period.

 

[TG-55Panthercules]

These are not cheats at all.  None of these settings affect spotting of aircraft.  All they change it viewing terrain better in the distance, period.

 

I wasn't specifically talking about these particular settings - I was reacting to the last 3 postings just above mine which seemed to be talking about the MP "cheating" issue I mentioned.  Should have been clearer about that in my post.

[coconut]

That's an excellent post; however, I'm trying to get the 'bubble' to extend further than it is, and these settings don't appear to change that.

 

Ysp04tH.jpg

 

The key problem in this screenshot is the difference in darkness between the 3d trees and the texture-based fake forest. Fixing that should be trivial, and could result in tremendous positive results.

[VBF-12_Stick-95]

I wasn't specifically talking about these particular settings - I was reacting to the last 3 postings just above mine which seemed to be talking about the MP "cheating" issue I mentioned.  Should have been clearer about that in my post.

 

Ah, gotcha.  I should have read closer as well.

[coconut]

The key problem in this screenshot is the difference in darkness between the 3d trees and the texture-based fake forest. Fixing that should be trivial, and could result in tremendous positive results.

 

I can't figure out how to get the whites right, but here is a picture where the far forest look darker:

[wellenbrecher]

I wasn't specifically talking about these particular settings - I was reacting to the last 3 postings just above mine which seemed to be talking about the MP "cheating" issue I mentioned.  Should have been clearer about that in my post.

But there is no issue. Or rather there is no issue if devs pay a minimal and rather "common sense" based bit of attention to how they set it up. 

That was the whole point of my post and Emil's.

 

Besides, it's all idle speculation anyway.

Who knows why it is that way, at worst it's a hardcoded limit in the engine for some weird reason and all dreams of a higher render distance would be moot anyway.

Edited April 10, 2015 by wellenbrecher

[TG-55Panthercules]

Who knows why it is that way, at worst it's a hardcoded limit in the engine for some weird reason and all dreams of a higher render distance would be moot anyway.

 

Well, there's definitely something weird going on with BoS that isn't happening with RoF (supposedly on the same basic engine) - I've never seen this sort of "bubble of blur" effect in RoF, so hopefully it's not truly a hardcoded limit in the engine (unless maybe it's some weird side effect of the higher speeds of the aircraft in BoS - too bad we don't have a Storch in BoS so we could test this at slow, RoF-like speeds).

[kestrel79]

Do you guys remember the old dev blogs? I remember seeing one of the first ones, it showed cars driving at night. They zoomed out the camera and you could see the headlights super far away and zoomed out. I really thought this sim wasn't going to have that bubble effect. Maybe they had to add it in there to keep the fps up once they added more meat to the game but hopefully as the game progresses this stuff can be lifted as computer hardware increases and time goes on just like in the original IL2.

 

As someone who loves to high alt bomb this has always been a problem in sims.