[?] Thoughts on LOD1

[smee]

Well been making some statics which don't really push the envelopes but was having some thoughts about LOD1's

As i understand it a model is drawn at LOD0 upto a range which can be set in the editor. say 50/75/100 LOD0/50 LOD 1 75 LOD 2 100 once you reach that distance the bf2 engine then redraws using the next lowest LOD.

Nothing earth shattering so far. Now if you bring up your Bin's you then redraw at the higher LOD so the engine is doing more swapping. Which means its working, sometimes changing materials as well as geom.

Taking that the bf2 engine is pretty old now. 5+ and the advance in graphics cards could it not be time to maybe get ride of LOD 1's so no LOW settings ( so medium/high ).

Ok I know what i'm likely to hear, what about the people with low spec machines.

Well IF you took out LOD'1 you would have to increase the distance of render, but then you wouldnt have the swaping of models and redrawing of textures this would reduce an amount of load on the gfx. It's already had to draw the LOD0 cause your inrange of it. or moving into it. And real distance objects would be LOD 2's Remind people to reduce Anti aliasing which is more consuming than drawing, so to improve their performance.

I'm just thinking the reducing of LOD's from the model would maybe 1/4 the redrawing needed to be done by the gfx. Ok so there would be more of a constant work rate than lots of changes.

Just wondering would there be a way of testing this . to force LOD's 0 .

[Z-trooper]

I will try to give my opinion on this matter in general terms and related to PR.

First of all, even if you have a great rig you will quickly run into problems if we base most of stuff on lod0's and forget about lod1 as you say. Even though the distance may seem fairly low and the reducing of tris might not be that great - imagine a city map with 10's or maybe even 100's of static objects surrounding you, it would be absolutly critical to squeeze that last juice from each of the lod1s. Especially in shooters where every one of the 64 individual soldiers carry an automatic weapon that also has to do collision maths on 3 levels on all objects.
Trust me, it will sum up to be quite a number.

The other point is that when you are even a small distance away from a static object you do not notice smaller details and you might as well get rid of them.

About the redrawing thing. Well. First of all, most of bf2/pr statics use the same texture pallets for each of the lods so there wont be any swapping there.
The geometry point... well each and every single object is redrawn each frame weather you like it or not that is just how rasterizing works. So if we can cut the number of vertices that need to be send to the gfx card - great success!

And the final point for keeping them. players with low settings start at lod1 instead of lod0.
And trust me, there will always be a significant percentage of players of any games who run games on low or medium settings.

On the point that the engine is old. While that may be true, look at the amount of objects and sizes we have compared to any vbf2 map.
The engine is very little responsible for the actual performance compared to the sum of all the objects and texture sizes. So we have compensated for the advancement of computer power by adding more stuff for the poor computer to crunch through many times a second.

Those are my main points for keeping lod1's