well, it works, you just dont see it
the range where you see enemy ships is somewhere near ~5k - kinda your "sensor range". and no, there is no way to increase that (unless some genious tells me how to).
NPC ships ar also spawned when you get into a zone (area). It creates an image of everpresent NPCs, but in fact they all are very temporary (they either get shot or dumped when no player is nearby)

the "big" LOD distances only work for stationary objects, i.e. solars (planets, bases, ...)

i hope this helped,
Fjord

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Excelcia Mod Leading Developer

I don't think you understood entirely. What I mean is the jumps in LODs. I want to see more details on the ships I can see at greater distance. If I can only see ships at some hard-coded distances, that's all well and fine, I just don't want to see the jumps between LODs as clearly as default FL. They're like a slap on the eyelids...

ah,lol.
hmm, that should work without problems.

LODranges = 0, 40, 60, 140, 300, 1000
would be the original entry
LODranges = 0, 800, 1500, 2500, 3500, 5000
should work IMO.
one thing that might affect this is that not just the ship, but also all guns that make up for the visual image of the ship have also LOD ranges. try to increase those in weapon_equip.ini.
find/replace should get most of them as the ranges are usually the same.
LODranges = 0, 20, 60, 100 <- usual entries
give them the same as for ur ships.

Fjord

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Excelcia Mod Leading Developer

Many thanks. I'll check in with a report, for the records and stuff, once I've tested it.

Well, I'll be! It seems to really work this time! I didn't do any thorough testing though, because I've got some big thing in Real Life to focus on really soon, but at least the LOD-jump in the first cutscene with King has disappeared. Teh win! It did chew a bit FPS, but it's probably worth it. *Damns the evil SOB who gave almost every different ship their very own LOD-ranges*

There is a good reason for that though.

At ranges of over 200m or so, you are not going to see the finest details in the textures on the ship whatsoever, you simply cannot notice them. At which point, the highest detail LOD range is useless. This applies to most stuff

... unless you found a way to run FL on 2048*1536.. ROFL

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Excelcia Mod Leading Developer

Chips,

You are 100 % correct.. the voice of sanity... I have played with lod ranges on ships to try and get better results and as Lord fjord says they only work at high resolutions, the standard freelancer ships to me will stay in view the appropraite time as they are on sensors, and anybody who can spot details at 5 km is only using resources that would be better used to make the game run smoother not slower...

Somehow I think the designers had this in mind.. detail up close when you can see the whites of their eyes...

Harrier.


Retreat[![! ---- I'm too badly messed up now[![!

Althou Chips is right, I think one just can't have enough details Plus, on todays systems the performance hit when everything is displayed at max details is almost not noticeable. My framerate never drops below 60FPS (at 1280x960, 6x AA, 16x AF), not even in mass PvP fights.

Just set this (example)

LODranges = 0, 800, 1500, 2500, 3500, 5000

to this

LODranges = 0, 500000

and you should see everything in a 500k radius at maximum details, even those little fighters at the opposite side of the sector (but you still can't see them until you're running a resolution of something like 3000 x 2250 or higher ). This only affects the visual range at which an object can be seen, not the range the sensors use to draw a bracket around an object. For example I can see people fighting each other even when I am about 7k away from them and they're not on my sensors. The ships are so small one barely can see them, but they're there. I came up with this brute force method because I was too lazy to figure out the distance for unnoticable LOD changes :p.

Something similar to the above can be done with asteroid fields, too, but you need a very high end machine (talking about Doom3 system requirements for high detail gameplay) to display everything without problems. In addition, if values for asteroids are set too high, the game not only becomes a slideshow (like 1 frame every 10 hours), you also see some ugly "welding" effects which look like the different sectors of any given asteroid field were glued together.

As for editing this LODranges stuff, Microsoft Excel comes in quite handy. All the files containing LODranges can be done in less than 10 minutes. Just paste everything from the INI into Excel, select a user specified filter, filter for "lodranges*" (don't forget the asterisk behind "lodranges" and Excel should display all lines containing this LODRanges stuff. Now prepare the first line like the example (LODRanges = 500000) given above and pull it down to the last line displayed, overwriting everything that is there. Discard all the filters, mark everything and copy it back into the INI, overwriting everything that is there. Save & exit & repeat with the rest of the files.

The only thing that this LODRanges method does not affect is the visibility of tradelanes, which remain at their 10k distance of being drawn. If someone knows how this can be altered so tradelane rings can be seen from a longer than 10k distance, please post. No, LODRanges for Tradelane Rings does not have an effect on their viewing distance.

There are some detail issues with textures too, which can't be fixed even with 16x anisotropic filtering of the graphics card. Something like LODranges, but for textures. This is noticeable when closing in on large objects like battleships. Just look at the lights emitted from the crew quarters when closing in on a battleship and you should see what I mean.

Edited by - Preacher0815 on 8/19/2004 2:36:48 PM

Hmmm,

I wonder how all this affects those who want to play mp on line with a modem, who run resolutions of 800 x 600 max on machines that are more than a couple of years old and less capable than your cray...

talk about taking things to extremes..

Hmmm....

Harrier


Retreat[![! ---- I'm too badly messed up now[![!

Lord Fjord Im running Fl on that resolution and I say It looks Damn awesome. Cause of WIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIDDDEEEEESCCREEENN MoniTOre lol

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Ahh... sweet simplicity point, click, own.

[EFS Aravis+$_Capt On 24/7 Eagle Utopia

The Republic Mod

Well, it's a clientside only mod, which doesn't affect the server at all. Nothing is drawn if the neccessary informations aren't being sent from the server. Every client can be modded to perfectly fit the performance of the computer it is running on. I don't see any problems with that. On my old rig I had around 40fps at details maxed out, but that was with 1024x768 and without AA & AF filtering.