asteroid/debris popping

Thu Feb 27, 2003 12:32 pm by sellout

I don't know if anyone has noticed this other than myself, but asteroids have a tendency to be drawn on the screen right in front of your eyes as well as many objects, although I have to play with this more I have found settings that seem to improve the overall look of the game even more at the cost of some speed.
Its pretty simple : open my documents, my games, freelancer trail, and then the file perfoptions; set asteroids to 5.00. Those were optimal settings for me, but earlier I had the entire debris field on screen at once... so you can go hog wild if you want.

Well, if anyone would like to comfirm this it'd be much appreciated. I also recommend you check your graphics settings and have them set to quality and a little anisotropic filtering may help the visuals too. Maybe I just have my gamma and other settings perfected but I don't recall ever having seen a better looking space combat game. Very nice!

*note other settings that I know change things :

Nebula - if you put this above one the fog is stronger in badlands so you slam into more stuff

Asteroids - put above 1 and more asteroids are rendered at once (above)

Space_dust_details - puts more 'particles' around you so you can double or quadruple the amount of dust you see go by while moving

Guesses:

Suneffect - bigger extensive lens flares

level_of_detail - 'hoping' that has something to do with the distance objects are rendered at because having things just appear on screen annoys me. *

-=Andrew=-

Edited by - sellout b1tch on 27-02-2003 13:11:56

Fri Feb 28, 2003 12:00 am by †

Yeah, I too noticed that things "materialize" out of nowhere right in time for me to hit them...very annoying to say the least.

I was also looking for any ini to alter to adjust the "drawing distance" for such things, thanks for pointing me towards the apparent one.

It seems rather odd that you can see ships, planets, staions, etc, all drawn from great distances, but tings like asteroids and minable debris pops up right in front of you. lol
What is even stranger is that DA somehow overlooked the slider adjustment for us to SPECIFY this "drawing distance"...especially considering every game I have played for the last few years had had this option it seems...at least we should be able to write our own little "Freelancer Visual Enhancement" programs with the settings readily available in the ini files.

But, anyway, thanks for pointing me to that.
Will try to post back any settings I find helpful!

Fly Well,

PD

§~~~~~~~~~~~~~§
"And what have I done to cause trouble? I tried to discuss this game in a very calm and rational manner. I descibed the games strenghts and weaknesses, and explained why I felt that way. I did not attack anyone. The only ones abusing people here are the mods and the regulars. It almost seems to be a sect-like atmosphere here, where no one is allowed to have a view that isn't that of the moderators.

Anyway if you want to discuss this more feel free to e-mail me.

"
--Freud--
§~~~~~~~~~~~~~§

Fri Feb 28, 2003 12:03 am by 666heretic

well i could offer a scientific explination like soem swamp gas from venus refracted light from the sunt o produce an illusion....but its jsut a game. but i have heard that the farther out in space you are adn the faster u go some things appear to stay the same place but really have moved. sorta like if you ever have seen a fan in a strobe light it seems that the fan is going slower and opposite of the direction it really is....

but really ms games prolly had some pixel stuff and i think that the far away pic is a diff thing than the actual field so things are in different places.

-I trade for a living, rouges piss me off, come get me, catch me if you can, i will leave you in the dust, or you'll die trying, take your pick.-

@Heretic Inc. We trade because we own.@

Fri Feb 28, 2003 8:24 am by Droniac

They simply did it to ease the amount of strain on your CPU/GPU...
Instead of rendering everything in the entire universe, the game simply renders everything closeby and puts a 'background' for the rest of the universe in place...
It's a very effective (and common) way to reduce the amount of strain on your CPU and GPU..

Now, release the game in The Netherlands and bring out a patch that gives us a slider for this!

BTW: If you really crash into asteroids because of this, then you're not a very good pilot i guess, unless you're reffering to the supersonic debris

Fri Feb 28, 2003 9:04 am by sellout

Thats true, but even my lowly 1.3ghz duron and geforce4 ti4200 (315/600 stable, go MSI) can render way more than the game engine allows for. I really want to fix object popup too though. I hate seeing trade rings, spacestations, etc. suddenly appear on my screen. The engine looks so good too... I really hope I can find something to change this. There are many people with comps well over 2ghz with GeForce4 Ti4600s or even Ati Radeon 9700s that could probably handle 20 times the current viewing distance. Oh well, I will continue to look for a way to change viewing distance when I get at my own comp again.

Fri Feb 28, 2003 10:27 am by ElectricBrain

Um...sellout, I suggest you remove the latter part of your name. Thx.

You can edit the LOD in the perfoptions.ini file in your My Documents/My Games/Freelancer folder. Has anyone tried this yet?

- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Fri Feb 28, 2003 11:26 am by Incendiary Lemon

The popup is still there even if you ramp the LOD up (i went to 20.)

I think it may be a problem where they don't have the model for viewing something at that distance.

EDIT: I'm looking at shiparch.ini which has a LOD Range line for each ship

eg "LODranges = 0, 80, 120, 200, 300, 1200"

I think this is what we might want to look at

Edited by - Incendiary Lemon on 28-02-2003 11:37:42

Fri Feb 28, 2003 3:23 pm by Kalfireth

How does this relate to textures? I've tried fiddling with everything in there but even in turret view when I change the view on my own ship it still changes to a lower detail texture at the back - which is stupid, I mean the things right infront of me.

Are you saying we've got to go through each **** and alter their LOD values to change when lower resolution models and textures are booted up? (If thats the case, someone please make a program to do this - it's not that I can't change a few text settings, but there's a lot of them!)

Fri Feb 28, 2003 6:30 pm by sellout

The shiparch.ini file is unreadable even in notepad for me... maybe a demo thing?

@EB - is there any way to change my name or do I just have to reregister?

Edited by - sellout b1tch on 28-02-2003 20:07:41

Fri Feb 28, 2003 9:47 pm by sellout

k, I checked into the LOD settings and the effect on viewing distance seems to be nil.

with LOD setting at 1, I could see detruit munitions from 14.5k away

with the setting at 100, I could see detruit munitions at 14.7k

with the setting at 9999, I could see it from 14.9...

I'm starting to think maybe the LOD has no effect at all and these slight differences are just because the angle I was viewing from. I guess I'm the only person this bothers, but unless I'm in a nebula, I'd like to be able to see atleast one grid ahead of me.

Sat Mar 01, 2003 3:24 am by Incendiary Lemon

Your not the only person it bothers, to edit the other ini files like shiparch you'll need to decompress them. Go into the editing forum and check out the thread about ini compression.

Sat Mar 01, 2003 6:17 am by ElectricBrain

sellout, click here, login and change your name

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