[REPORTED]Trees in Caucasus map look wrong

Deleted.

I flew yesterday around Gudauta and nearby valleys specifically to look at the trees but I'm not seeing such errors both at low and high level. Is it max zoom cropped picture?

btw: @latest beta of course.

my settings are:

textures: med, terrain textures: low, visibility: extreme, trees: max, grass: max.

Tested 3 seasons here they look fine on my machine

I have the same issue. Tried to reinstall the whole thing. Didn't work.

@Mustang, it's visible at your screenshots as well, on distant trees.

Yes that's how it's supposed to work, if there were highly detailed trees all the way to the horizon the FPS would drop significantly, it's only the close to middle range details that need to look good.

Do you have screenshots? I mean whole screen - not crops. We'll see where the LOD start to degrade in your case.

I have two uncropped and unzoomed screens showing the problem. The screenshots were taken with visibility setting 'medium'. Since then I have turned the visibility distance to 'high' and while there is an improvement in the lod distance changing, still it is not quite as it should be. Still can see low poly treesfrom my cockpit from time to time...

https://forums.eagle.ru/showpost.php?p=4175455&postcount=3724

When you see them - what is the FoV value? Is it only with max zoom?

When you see them - what is the FoV value? Is it only with max zoom?

I can check that later when I'm home. I have specific FOV for each module in the cockpit.

The screens were taken with default f2/Rctrl+f11 FoV.

Are they fine if you move the trees slider to max? I found the setting to be easy on performance.

I'll upload a video to demonstrate this issue even further when I get home.

I've been reporting this for some time, the LODs are not great when the lowest radius is chosen, there is a weird 2D sprite effect as well when the lowest radius is chosen and the LOD displayed is low.

I can. While I'm doing that, location is Gudauta, but it doesn't matter because I've tested trees all across the map.

Yeah there's no location, it's trees in common.

The "new-old" trees look great for me as well. Not sure what's happening for you, Nikola?

It's definitely a LOD based thing, but also a shading issue. I fly on Medium distance due to being in VR, but the lower Rez trees are truly horrible, and primarily because of the shading, it's like the textures have been pre-shaded and simply don't match their surroundings.

For example, this capture is taken on a freshly repaired install with no mods from the Quickstart F/A-18C River Run mission, right at the start. See how the high poly trees in the foreground are lit from the right side, as per the position of the sun?

Now look at the low poly trees on the other side of the water behind them. They look like the light is coming from the opposite direction on the left side. When you're flying, seeing not only the shift in low to high poly models or vice versa, but you're also seeing what looks like a complete change in the lighting of them, it really sticks out.

If you've never seen this before, and now can't "unsee it", I apologize!

The LODs were probably designed with 100% radius, or draw distance , which is a predetermined number. I'll try to explain what's happening with the example speculation below:

Let's assume for example max 100%$ tree draw distance is 1000meters, and there's 5 LOD levels, each 200 meters long.

Symmetric LOD

11111111112222222222333333333344444444445555555555

Asymmetric LOD

11111112222222333333333333333333333344444445555555

I didn't took the time to figure out that which type it is, as it could be quite complex if multiple levels are different.

At the lowest setting the highest LOD level only works very very close, so you need to be like in your nose to see it, like 20 meters or less, but the "2D Sprite" effect seems encompass quite a bit of range of LODs, from 30% to 80% feels like, (no talking draw distance here), 100% being the farthest out and the lowest quality LOD, but the fathest end of the LOD kinda looks fine as they're just blobs, not distracting at all, again the end of it is also truncated/shortened just like the higest quality LODs, I'm not sure if this is intended or simply looks like this but whatever it is, it's wrong in practice and realism IMO.

So you get like this, as it looks at first, at 30% draw radius.

1122333333444555

And I approx written it shorter like this to simultate the lower draw distance versus the above control case example.

The LODs are dynamic to the draw radius amount selected, which I think is not the proper way, even if it did make sense kinda, and I could understand.

So the distances between LODs change depending on the tree draw distance amount, this seems to make sense in math, but doesn't work in practice, you never get a draw distance option in real life in the first place, and if you stand 2 miles away from the forrest, that forrest will never change it's LOD at that distance separation.

The LODs and their distances should be fixed according to a realistic profile determined in development and set fixed, never to be changed in the GUI, or at least not to be changed by the tree draw radius option, unfortunately that means lower quality trees will get cut first and so on, the more you'll lower the tree draw distance the less LODs you will see, and you'll see a lot of high quality LOD levels closest to you, with unfortunately an abrupt ending, is not realistic yes, but that's the cost of using the tree draw radius option, and I think it should be taken as a better method because the LODs would be kept realistic how you would see them in real life, leaving only the tree draw distance setting not realistic, so it's only one instead of two things being unrealistic.

100%

11111111112222222222333333333344444444445555555555

30%

1111111111222

If you are seeing issues with the trees please remove all unofficial mods (if any)

 

run a cleanup and repair or verify for steam users.

 

if you still see the same please attach your dcs log so we can take a look.

 

thank you

No mods, repair run, shaders folders deleted.

This is the second run after the shaders re-compiled, I forgot to save the track file on the first one!

In the screenshot, the trees don't look quite as bad from this angle, but you can see something is not quite right with the trees on the other side of the river off the wingtip. When you're flying along it's sooo noticeable as they really pop when they switch from 3d trees to 2d flat textures, and it's happening at about a 1km radius from the player with my settings. It's the same kind of phenomena as in my previous screenshot that causes you to really notice it, where the lighting on the 3d trees comes from the direction of the sun, but the 2d trees seem to be from the opposite direction.

Track file: trees.trk

Log File: dcs.zip

Options.lua: options.zip

Reported thanks

 

Free camera far LOD is incorrect.

 

the team will adjust it.

Well hang on guys, that's not entirely it just yet, the LOD are a loooot more finesse, and complicated, there's probably like a couple of hundred LOD levels in those trees the way they can change with distance away from camera, and it's not only in free camera infact the problem starts

Adjusting the FAR LOD alone isn't going to fix this because the whole thing looks like it's using FAR LOD when you have the lowest (30%, distance?) tree draw distance set. It's not really the FAR LOD, it's just because the high quality trees only appear in the first 10-15% of the distance, everything more than 20% it starts to look like "2D Sprites" (not really a sprite in technical terms), the actual 3D models get replaced gradually by multiple 2D textures to make the trees, those 2D trees are made of several 2D textures, 5 or more, the two are vertically placed to make up an X sign and one is placed horizontally to be viewed from the sky, these 2D Textures also follow the camera, their orientation is clamped to the player's camera wherever it is, not the unit the player is using.

When you have tree draw distance set to the max (Trees Visibility), the whole thing unravels like a harmonic so the bad looking "2D Sprite" trees only start appearing much further away and blend with the environment which makes the effect very much less noticable, so the LODs were never right IMO, it just wasn't that noticable in the 100% Trees Radius setting.

The next chapter is a completely other thing, shadowing, which is a different layer of LODs, the highest LOD level shadowing in the lowest chosen tree draw distance (30% Trees Visibility) is also in effect very very close, the shadowing has much less major LOD levels as there's a few distinct changes in the lighting of the scene I noticed, like 3 or 4 in total, when you zoom out and suddenly the forrest is a lot more lighter, that's the LOD transition, or when you can see how there's a line moving across the screen in the forrest in front of the aircraft, it's much more coarse, or well the distances between the LODs are truncated with the 30% setting, like a harmonic, so this applies, coarsness isn't that of a problem, it doesn't make it look realistic but that's fine, the problem is that there's a band that's near the player where the shadowing disappears.

However that's not all, there's a LOD level in the shadow layer, that actually erases the just-introduced higher LOD levels of tree shadows, so that's another separate bug.

Distance between each LOD level has to be set-fixed "read-only" and DECOUPLED away from the Tree Radius setting!

For example:

Tree LOD1 0....100 meters

Tree LOD2 100....300 meters

Tree LOD2 300....500 meters

These baseline numbers have to be determined by development what they objectively think looks fine in terms of realistic visibility, while using a development-only extreme draw distance viewing to infinity, so then you introduce LODs in, and those LODs should become fixed to that what our human eye percieves when looking at forrest to infinity (well modifiable in LUA, but unchangable in terms of graphics settings for general use), and then a sensible maximum tree draw distance is determined but distances between LODs are again kept the same and completely separate from the tree draw distance (Trees Visibility), only then there should be a setting to lower away from the optimal for performance considerations.

Same for lighting, same for tree features and their size, but the 2D Sprite effect should simply be used after 50% of the draw distance, now it's used much quicker, I know it's performance, but it has to look right first.

You can see in the videos the trees wiggling so much on the lowest distance setting right now, because the LODs are so truncated together they change a lot by just a bit of movement (distance change) of the player's camera.

I'm doing videos and screenshots, but I won't complicate this post further, this was the overview while I was recording, but I'll go more in detail with the videos step by step in the next post.

I'm not sure it if it the same thing as being discussed here, but my trees have been looking not good since the recent update.

No mods, repair run, shaders folders deleted.

 

This is the second run after the shaders re-compiled, I forgot to save the track file on the first one!

 

In the screenshot, the trees don't look quite as bad from this angle, but you can see something is not quite right with the trees on the other side of the river off the wingtip. When you're flying along it's sooo noticeable as they really pop when they switch from 3d trees to 2d flat textures, and it's happening at about a 1km radius from the player with my settings. It's the same kind of phenomena as in my previous screenshot that causes you to really notice it, where the lighting on the 3d trees comes from the direction of the sun, but the 2d trees seem to be from the opposite direction.

 

 

Track file: [ATTACH]225568[/ATTACH]

 

Log File: [ATTACH]225569[/ATTACH]

 

Options.lua: [ATTACH]225570[/ATTACH]

What is your Trees Visibility, that's the most important number we need?

You are using 80% Trees Visibility in the GUI, so you're not at 100% or 30% which is what I'm testing, I'm using 30% as I don't have enough performance for 100%, this is how I noticed this issue from the very beginning of SpeedTrees. For these tests you should either use 30% or 100% to compare between two to see what I'm talking about, no need to test any number in between, the setting just extends the distances between LODs like an accordion as well as the maxium tree coverage distance as well. If you guys all use different settings then you will all be seeing different results and thinking it's some other bug and only some people have it, everyone has it, but the higher Trees Visibilty you go the less obvious it is.

I found another weird thing, the Trees Visibility in GUI is linked to "forestDistanceFactor" and not "treesVisibility" in the configuration file.

["treesVisibility"] = 6000, is a value that never changes, when I was testing months before I had no idea, I was changing this setting and it didn't do much, now I know why, but I distinctly remember it working (it would change when reloading DCS) but I forgot to be sure, I wanted it go lower to disable trees but it wouldn't work.

Your Trees Visiblity is 80% because you have ["forestDistanceFactor"] = 0.8,

But as I previously explained, the tree LOD system is totally wrong, it has to be completely redone, reporting annomalies of how trees look from 50% or 60% or 80% forestDistanceFactor is of no help, the comparison between 30 and 100% is enough to understand this. I wouldn't waste time with the percentages in-between, because this will be automatically fixed once the root cause of the problem is fixed.

DCS options.lua Worrazen 30Trees.zip