Zooming and LOD switching

[Jockson 10]

I've finally upgraded my computer and switched from OFP to ARMA 2 and I'm loving it, but one thing keeps bugging the hell out of me: the vegetation LOD switching when using the zoom button. It's not my video and it's from ARMA 1 but just to make it clear what I'm referring to:

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Now, I do realize the models need to change at some point and when moving around that is absolutely fine as it's a lot harder to notice. However, when looking at trees and bushes from distance, those higher quality models that you get when you zoom in with the right mouse button are not really that much more detailed but the change in shape is very noticeable and distracting.

I'm far from an expert when it comes to graphics in computer games so feel free to shoot this idea down if it's silly :) My suggestion is to disable LOD switching of the vegetation when using the zoom button but leave everything else as it is now. So, basically LODs of trees and bushes don't change when casually eye zooming but when you actually move/get closer to them or use optics/binoculars then they switch like they do now. Would this be possible to implement as an option and what does everyone think about it? Despite the models being actually less detailed, it would make the game look better IMO and perhaps even improve the performance as well.

[Sosna 0]

I agree, it is very distracting and immersion breaking. Disabling LOD morphing when using low level zoom is one good solution. The lower vegetation LODs look pretty good anyways. Raising the FOV to more OFP like values may assist a little.

Another point: I believe that the more gradual LOD morphing is more distracting than an instantaneous switch. Since the eye/brain is attracted to motion, the longer duration of motion causes greater distraction. It would be nice to have an option for instant morphing LODs.

Gradual LOD morphing is a good idea, but not in situations of quick zooming. It does seem to conceal LOD switching when simply walking/running around.

[Jockson 10]

I agree, it is very distracting and immersion breaking. Disabling LOD morphing when using low level zoom is one good solution. The lower vegetation LODs look pretty good anyways. Raising the FOV to more OFP like values may assist a little.

Another point: I believe that the more gradual LOD morphing is more distracting than an instantaneous switch. Since the eye/brain is attracted to motion, the longer duration of motion causes greater distraction. It would be nice to have an option for instant morphing LODs.

Gradual LOD morphing is a good idea, but not in situations of quick zooming. It does seem to conceal LOD switching when simply walking/running around.

Yeah, agree with all that. Gradual LOD morphing works very well when walking/running around. All the movement plus the head bobbing makes it pretty much unnoticeable.

For low level zooming, it would be better if either LOD switching was simply disabled because, as you pointed out, the lower vegetation LODs look good anyway, or make the morphing much faster/instanteous. I'd prefer the former solution, but I'm not sure why is there such a long delay for LOD morphing anyway. Perhaps if the morphing occured while you're zooming in and not after you do, it would be a lot less noticeable.

The graphics in this game add so much immersion but this issue kind of ruins it for me.

[-GCA- Salah ad Din 10]

Or maybe if the higher LODs were more congruous with lower LODs the change wouldn't be so apparent.

[Jockson 10]

Salah ad Din;1491516']Or maybe if the higher LODs were more congruous with lower LODs the change wouldn't be so apparent.

True, but that wouldn't be anywhere near as easy to implement I think. I remember reading about ARMA 2 vegetation progress on the blog before the game was released and they were talking about how they reworked the whole algorithm and stuff responsible for this and yet it still far from perfect.

I'm still playing ARMA 2 a lot and still can't get used to LOD morphing :( Sosna is spot on with the eyes and brain being attracted to motion theory. Even during firefights I find myself very distracted by bushes and trees changing shape when zooming in. I've overclocked my computer to set the level of detail to very high but it doesn't really help much.

I guess nothing will be done about it as not enough people care, but I would really love if they would introduce a "disable vegetation LOD switching when zooming" option if not in future patches, then in Operation Arrowhead.

[benjellio 10]

How about we remove the low level eye zoom thing and then this problem wont occure, i love using zoom but find it sorta takes away some of the need for proper reccy and binos

[IronTrooper 0]

@benjellio:

Not everyone plays in high reses and not always you have binoculars. The zoom is useful.

I agree the LOD switching for this kind of zoom is unnecessary, immersion breaking and a bit distracting when you're looking for some movement and everything starts morphing...

[das attorney 858]

Looking at the video, the problem seems more that the LOD changes after the zoom has ended. If the LOD changed at the same time, it wouldn't be a problem. A Sosna mentioned, it looks fake because of the motion after the event (zooming). If the two were synched, then it would fool the brain and wouldn't draw attention to itself.

Are you sure your experience is as bad as this? you could look into using a SDD or RAM Drive to hold your texture files. Then there would be less lag when you zoom as the files are streamed much quicker compared to storing them on a SATA HD. I've put my Arma 2 on a RAM Drive and it's much better than it was at this sort of thing. To be fair to BIS, the texture switching is pretty good and is pretty convincing 95% of the time. However, they could look at tweaking some of the LOD threshholds. A quick walk around Utes with a DMR should yield a couple of examples of thrashy LOD switching.

By the way, any chance you could update the video to one involving Arma 2 zooming? It's kind of like reviewing Empire Strikes Back after having watched some footage of A New Hope ;)

[Jockson 10]

Looking at the video, the problem seems more that the LOD changes after the zoom has ended. If the LOD changed at the same time, it wouldn't be a problem. A Sosna mentioned, it looks fake because of the motion after the event (zooming). If the two were synched, then it would fool the brain and wouldn't draw attention to itself.

Are you sure your experience is as bad as this? you could look into using a SDD or RAM Drive to hold your texture files. Then there would be less lag when you zoom as the files are streamed much quicker compared to storing them on a SATA HD. I've put my Arma 2 on a RAM Drive and it's much better than it was at this sort of thing. To be fair to BIS, the texture switching is pretty good and is pretty convincing 95% of the time. However, they could look at tweaking some of the LOD threshholds. A quick walk around Utes with a DMR should yield a couple of examples of thrashy LOD switching.

By the way, any chance you could update the video to one involving Arma 2 zooming? It's kind of like reviewing Empire Strikes Back after having watched some footage of A New Hope ;)

Yes, definitely. If the LOD changing didn't occur AFTER the zoom has already ended, it wouldn't be nearly as noticeable.

I did use to think it was my old computer that is causing it but now that I can run the game smoothly most of the time, LOD morphing hasn't really improved from what I can tell. When you stand in one place and keep zooming in and out like in the video, does the game load files from the hard drive every time? I know a SSD or RAM drive would help with textures popping and game stutter, but would it really speed up the vegetation LOD morphing?

OK, I will record and post some videos of zooming in ARMA 2 :)

[das attorney 858]

I've been having a look at the scaling in game. It's definately not as apparent as in that video, but it's a bit slow and mainly it's just the vegatation that's affected. Buildings seem fine - maybe you should check out some of the mods available to reduce the scaling effect. But you are right, BIS should get it sorted out at some point, there's just so many other pressing issues with the game, it's probably lower down on the "to do" list. :)

Have a look at the thread on RAM Drives. It's pretty easy to set up, so if it doesn't work for you then you can just delete it from your HD. There's a free one called DataRAM RAMDisk that works okay. There's also one available called Speed disk RamDisk 10, but the free version only works for 15 days.

You can download the program to make symbolic links to the files on your RAMDisk here

Even if you have only 4Gb physical RAM installed, you can make a RAMDisk about 1.95Gb ~(which leaves 2..05Gb to run Arma) and put the following files on there (make sure to back them up first):

buildings

buildings2

chernarus

plants2_plant

plants2_Tree

structures

utes

If you have problems making symbolic links to the files, place them in an addons folder (in the ramdisk) and use a shortcut to the folder in the format -mod=r:\@Ramdisk.

Edited November 25, 2009 by Das Attorney

[Jex =TE= 0]

+1 on gettting this sorted.

[EDcase 87]

+1 vote to remove LoD update with RMB (eye) zoom.

[-GCA- Salah ad Din 10]

I've been having a look at the scaling in game. It's definately not as apparent as in that video, but it's a bit slow and mainly it's just the vegatation that's affected. Buildings seem fine - maybe you should check out some of the mods available to reduce the scaling effect. But you are right, BIS should get it sorted out at some point, there's just so many other pressing issues with the game, it's probably lower down on the "to do" list. :)

Have a look at the thread on RAM Drives. It's pretty easy to set up, so if it doesn't work for you then you can just delete it from your HD. There's a free one called DataRAM RAMDisk that works okay. There's also one available called Speed disk RamDisk 10, but the free version only works for 15 days.

You can download the program to make symbolic links to the files on your RAMDisk here

Even if you have only 4Gb physical RAM installed, you can make a RAMDisk about 1.95Gb ~(which leaves 2..05Gb to run Arma) and put the following files on there (make sure to back them up first):

buildings

buildings2

chernarus

plants2_plant

plants2_Tree

structures

utes

If you have problems making symbolic links to the files, place them in an addons folder (in the ramdisk) and use a shortcut to the folder in the format -mod=r:\@Ramdisk.

Sadly, RAMDisk takes it's chunk of RAM out of the 3.4 GB that are visible to my 32 bit Windows XP. I just made a RAMDisk of 1 GB for testing and my available RAM went from 2.6 GB to 1.6 GB. The 0.6 GB not being used by Windows XP are completely ignored.

[Jockson 10]

Here's a couple of videos from ARMA 2 (better to watch in bigger screen/HQ).

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While the trees don't change their shape as much as in the ARMA 1 video, the effect is still very similar. The higher LODs hardly give you any more details at such distance and yet the switching is very distracting and IMO breaks immersion.

I've been having a look at the scaling in game. It's definately not as apparent as in that video, but it's a bit slow and mainly it's just the vegatation that's affected. Buildings seem fine - maybe you should check out some of the mods available to reduce the scaling effect. But you are right, BIS should get it sorted out at some point, there's just so many other pressing issues with the game, it's probably lower down on the "to do" list. :)

Have a look at the thread on RAM Drives. It's pretty easy to set up, so if it doesn't work for you then you can just delete it from your HD. There's a free one called DataRAM RAMDisk that works okay. There's also one available called Speed disk RamDisk 10, but the free version only works for 15 days.

You can download the program to make symbolic links to the files on your RAMDisk here

Even if you have only 4Gb physical RAM installed, you can make a RAMDisk about 1.95Gb ~(which leaves 2..05Gb to run Arma) and put the following files on there (make sure to back them up first):

buildings

buildings2

chernarus

plants2_plant

plants2_Tree

structures

utes

If you have problems making symbolic links to the files, place them in an addons folder (in the ramdisk) and use a shortcut to the folder in the format -mod=r:\@Ramdisk.

Thanks I do only have 4GB of RAM but I'm going to try that and see if there's improvement. I agree it's not one of the most important things to fix right now but yeah, hopefully it will get sorted out at some point :)

[bensdale 0]

+1

The lod switch looks strange and between the switsches drop the FPS.

[Jockson 10]

Having just played the Operation Arrowhead demo, it was quite disappointing to see nothing has been done about this. In fact, it actually seems worse than it was before :( LOD switching of trees is ridiculously apparent with low level zooming as LODs seem to differ even more in shape than they did before. Anyone else think so? I quit playing ARMA 2 a long time ago and went back to OFP but these LODs in OA are so bad on my machine that I'm starting to think there might me something wrong with my hardware :)

[fraghetti 10]

theres nothing wrong with your hardware. this 'feature' belongs to arma just as the buggy AI does.

[wipman 1]

Hi, i find this way of work of the vegetation's LODs (threes & bushes) really bad, much worst than in the ArmA1 and there isn't any way (that i know) to solve this, setting the objects and textures to Very High doesn't help; if you're not zooming in... you gonna see a plain blob as three or bush. They'd made it worst with the vegetation on the ArmA2 and much more on the OA... than in the ArmA1, i find it sad. Let's C ya

[bensdale 0]

the only hope is voting for this:

a smoother LOD: http://dev-heaven.net/issues/show/7518

[nkenny 1057]

+1 vote to remove LoD update with RMB (eye) zoom.

This.

-k

[CarlGustaffa 4]

Optional! I'm forced to use pretty low settings, meaning the LODs I get are horrible. Zooming in and getting a LOD update may increase my chances of actually seeing through some trees. LOD switching isn't pretty, but it sure beats being blind.

[Jockson 10]

Optional, yes of course. I wouldn't mind if an option to disable the switching was only available through editing config files or whatever, as long as it's possible to do so.

So, we get an option to either a) disable LOD switching of trees and bushes altogether for low level zooming, or b) disable just the morphing effect, so the LODs still change but INSTANTLY while zooming, not with a delay.

Having either of those options would make a big difference. The latter one would work like OFP did, the only difference being that morphing would still work when you are walking or driving - best of both worlds. Even simply disabling morphing, while not the optimal solution, would be good.

Here's an example from OFP:

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Notice how by the time zooming is over, those trees in the distance have already changed LODs. That's 10 times less distracting than the zoom... delay... morphing effect that we get in ARMA 2/OA. In fact, it's almost completely unnoticeable unless you look for it.

It probably wouldn't work as good as it did in OFP because in OFP there was far fewer LOD changes but it would still be a huge improvement. Personally I don't think having as many LODs is neccessary. I mean, if I zoom in with RMB on a tree that is 15m in front of me, it completely changes its shape. It's a bit silly, really. I would much prefer the vegetation that doesn't look great up close but is more consistent shape wise and doesn't look like simple blobs from anywhere but close distances but that's another story!

[Jockson 10]

Sorry for bumping this thread again. I was doing some testing with OFP vs ARMA 2 and found that there is more LOD switching of trees in OFP that I previously thought there was. Still much less than in ARMA of course but the reason WHY it is so much more noticeable in ARMA is the morphing effect. As Sosna said at the beggining of this thread, the brain and eyes are attracted to motion and morphing just makes the switch even more obvious. That completely defies the reason why it's there in the first place!

At this point, I would be perfectly happy if there was an option to simply turn off the morphing effect. Not just in certain situations (zooming etc), just to simply turn it off altogether. Shouldn't be too much work to implement and it would likely improve performance a little bit too.

Now, I know chances of BIS doing this are slim, but I was wondering, is there a way it could be done as an addon? I remember when ARMA 2 came out and there was no way to turn off the motion blur effect, there was an addon that did just that. Any chance the morphing effect could be turned off this way as well?

[PuFu 4600]

Now, I know chances of BIS doing this are slim, but I was wondering, is there a way it could be done as an addon? I remember when ARMA 2 came out and there was no way to turn off the motion blur effect, there was an addon that did just that. Any chance the morphing effect could be turned off this way as well?

Unlikely since it is how the engine handles LODs. Motion blur effect was linked to PP effects in the options, so there was some degree of user customization, unlike the LOD switching

[Jockson 10]

I have done some MORE testing and I am now convinced of two things:

1. The game would be far better off without the morphing effect. It does nothing to make changes of LODs less noticeable.

2. There either HAS to be something wrong with my computer or Arma2:OA is for some reason a lot worse than Arma 2 when it comes to vegetation LODs.

Regarding point #1, like I've said, instant changes of LODs like in OFP are less distracting in the majority of the situations. I brought over friends of mine, all OFP fans to show them Arma2:OA demo and all of them kept asking "what is this, why are those trees changing their shape all the time?".

It's the morphing effect that makes those changes more apparent which defeats its whole purpose in the first place. Another comparison video:

OFP:

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These trees have the most drastic shape changes that I could find and yet LOD switching is very little apparent during gameplay.

OA:

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LOD morphing wouldn't be too bad if it were almost instant, without a delay. Instead, first there appears to be some delay, then a tree changes shape and then it morphs to another shape. That brings me to point #2, I can't find my ARMA 2 disk right now but I'm fairly certain that vegetation morphing wasn't THIS bad. It was a problem, I made a thread about it after all, but I don't remember all this multiple LOD morphing going on all over the place. Can anyone confirm OA is supposed to look like in the above video? Object detail is set to very high.

Also, yet another advantage of instant LOD changes:

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Some recording frame rate issues but you get the idea. High level zoom with instant LOD changes = perfect.

Instant LOD switching obviously isn't ideal but it is much better than what we have now in my opinion. The morphing effect does the opposite of what it's supposed to do and actually significantly pronounces LOD changes. It won't be on the list of priorities but an option to simply disable the effect would be VERY welcome :)