zombie-yellow wrote:I think several buildings should have better LODs in PR... I've experienced this far too many times on different buildings
Yes, they should.
There is three major obstetrical with updating them however.
First, man power, and skilled man power at that. We simply don't have enough devs, let alone enough devs with the right skill set to go around and update all the buggy building lods, its hard enough for us just to make lods for new vehicles etc. It isn't a quick job to make a new lod for a building, your talking a few hrs per building to do a good job.
The second, and the biggest problem when it comes to static objects like buildings, lightmaps. The problem is updating any building once its in a map and lightmapped, its very hard to get out of the map, let alone update. There are so many buggy statics in PR which we are trying to get rid of but just can't, other than though telling mappers not to put any of the buggy statics in their new maps and trying to phase out the old ones... But basically, if a static is changed, even a tiny bit, and it wasn't made with custom LM UVs (which none of our buggy ones where) and we don't have the max scene for them, then its next to impossible to update without re-lightmapping every single map that object was in after the update.
The third issue is we don't have any of the .max scenes for pretty much all of these buggy statics and many of them are also vBF2 statics which to state the obvious, we didn't make... As such to fix them we would have to go though a gulling importing process, which crates more errors which need to be cleaned up before you can even think of trying to fix the problem you set out to fix and your likely to miss a few errors or screw something up when doing this...
As such, there is little hope for fixing buggy statics like this, other than extending their lod switching distances which will affect performance negatively if we do so.
hate it to
