Draw distances

[unreasonable]

After DevDiary 50 I wanted to start a new thread building on Fifi's spotting distance thread, but just sticking to the facts of how BoS is drawing various things, and if we have suggestions for changes, but leaving to one side for the moment all the issue of spotting enemies in combat.

 

My observations to date (running on Ultra):

 

1) Stalingrad building shells.

 

My impression is that the draw distance now is much greater than in ver49, and there is very little annoying transition as detail is added, at any zoom level. Hard to see how this could be improved. Excellent!

 

2) Forest.

 

Forest drawing is zoom dependent and the draw distance is short. Hard to make direct comparisons since F11 free camera is still not working, but looks much shorter than max draw for forests in RoF.

 

BoS forest does a sort of phased adding of detail as trees are added to the snowy base as you get closer or zoom in. At full detail it looks great, but the intermediate phases are giving me a lot of pixilation and the base is unconvincing.

 

Overall, very good in low flight, but at anything over a few hundred metres the current rendering detracts from the quality of the environment.

 

Simple way to solve this would be to give users a forest distance slider as in RoF GUI. I fail to see how this could cause support problems for 777 or influence MP.

 

3) Static Ground objects.

 

This is based on Lapino map since the base has some ground vehicles and parked planes.

 

This one is odd: the draw distance for the parked planes is zoom dependent and remarkably short. As you approach the base the revetments around the parking spaces are clearly visible, and then at about 2km, wham, a large plane is revealed. Actually you can clearly make out the oil drums around the parked planes before the planes appear at all!

 

Not a permanent setting one hopes: again so hard to see why we cannot alter this ourselves.