EM

Well, I understand that you are looking for “realism instead of frame rate” solution, while some users (e.g. me) would prefer some “frame rate instead of realism” (to some extent at least).
What do you think are candidates for rendering options that could/should improve the frame rate? Which of those could be adjusted dynamically/automatically as needed?

Right – if something is _absolutely_ not visible (e.g. 10 mile vis and it’s 100 miles away) it gets _completely culled_.

But if a building would go from the 1st to second LOD (and reduce complexity) at 1 km, we don’t rescale that to 100m because it’s foggy. This is because we assume the LOD is based on size on the screen – something might be fogged out but still relatively big on the monitor, so the details are needed.

Ben says that we do not currently factor in fog and visibility decreases from rain and clouds. I’m not sure about future plans, but obviously we want to squeeze the most performance out of X-Plane. If something isn’t visible to the player, we don’t want to draw something then draw a cloud on top of it!

This is not to comment on any other performance tricks we pull, I really don’t know much about how that part of the code works. So, don’t make any assumptions anybody.

I think it would help more bugs to be reported if (in addition to the log) bad LODs would be highlighted (r.g. bright green) in the scenery when the problem is detected.

To be effective LODs should be a tree (or even a forest) of objects: If a building has walls, windows, a roof, etc., each being a LOD, at some distance the whole building should be just a “gray brick” before vanishing; i.e. not only reduce the details of each object, but also reduce the number of LODs.

Finally: Do LODs also interact with visibility? For example if it’s foggy you won’t see much detail even at short distance in real life. Can clouds and rain also be LODs?