Popping asteroids

[Mycu]

I've noticed that asteroids in the game often appear with effect of suddenly popping close to the player which breaks the immersion much.

Also even on the last trailer you can see how the ship at some point switches to a version with more polygons:

https://youtu.be/QC-s7fAhdyw?t=21

The same happens with the asteroid here:

https://youtu.be/QC-s7fAhdyw?t=53

Many of X4 players have powerful computers and it would be very useful to be able to set such thing.
Egosoft, is it possible to make a setting in the game, or at last in some *.INI file, which will allow us to adjust the drawing distance (or other setting that is causing it)?

[LameFox]

I've often wondered about that... the lack of some lower LOD distant models makes me wonder if the game tracks them at all out that far. After all it seems like such a common solution. It's certainly a lot more intrusive in X4 than in games like Elite Dangerous, which likewise presents players with mind-numbing amounts of floating rock, but introduces them far less obviously.

[linolafett]

Artist interpretation:
As far as i know its impossible for us to increase the distance upon asteroids "plop"in, as the game doesnt even know they exist.
Thats why we also can not fade them in nicely.
Its one of the things we would like to improve, but never got to do it.

For changing the render rules, when for example lods are changed, take a look at the "renderparam_library.xml".
Search for "ship render rules"
Per ship class there are then the rules defined, for when the next lods are picked (based on screen radius-in pixels (at lod setting 50 in the gfx options menu))
The smaller the "lodradius0" is, the later the LOD1 will be faded in.
If you for example change all "dbglodrule_ship_XX" rules to be the same as the "dbglodrule_ship_xs" then the ships will be much longer visible and change much later to a lower lod.
This of course will increase the cpu and gpu load quite a bit.

Do the same for "dbglodrule_1" to have the same effect on station modules.

There is a global multiplier for this (config.xml "lodfactor"), but it does break the ui, if it is set to higher than 1.0.
Thats why i am showing you the "proper" way of doing it^^

[Mycu]

Thanks Lino for a detailed information.

There are two topics here - one is the LOD distance rendering and the other is the moment the object (asteroid) appears on the screen.

In case of LOD distance I will have to check the settings you provided, but I don't understand why you write that the game doesn't know that an asteroid exists?
The strange thing is that some asteroids are visible from a very distant and others suddenly appear at a "close" distance from the player.
And it happens only with asteroids, not ships nor stations.

[MegaJohnny]

My guess is asteroids are spawned in "GTA-style" around the player, as opposed to them all being held in memory at all times. In low attention (OOS), all that's recorded is data about the "region" the asteroids are part of, and the region's overall resource yields.

I'm too lazy to look it up but UniTrader experimented with the yields back in X:R, and wrote a script to instantly deplete all the mineral resource regions to zero yield. And when he looked in-game, he found that those areas had almost no asteroids in them, even though they hadn't been destroyed by a real ship.

I feel it's probably the usual challenge of how well you give the illusion of all the asteroids being there, before you're in range for them to be spawned in. ED has extremely impressive asteroid belts that stretch out into the horizon, but they don't have the complication of the asteroid density changing over time.

[linolafett]

It has also to do with "zones", which are not exposed to the player. These are cubic volumes in which stuff is rendered.
Your current zone and the nearby zones are used for "culling" away things further away. Each cube is i think 70km in lenght. So at maximum you can see an asteorid 140km away, at minimum 70?
Thats at least my basic understanding of it.
Stations are by the way excluded of this culling, as we know where they are and how they look like.
Asteorids gets created on the fly, as far as i know. We dont save the locations of each and every asteorid you encounter.

[XTC0R]

So everything in this (70x70x70)km cubic should be visible? I also see asteroids popping up 10km in front of me (0% visible to instantly 100% visible). It feels really akward when flying through the asteroid fields.

[adeine]

Artist interpretation:
As far as i know its impossible for us to increase the distance upon asteroids "plop"in, as the game doesnt even know they exist.
Thats why we also can not fade them in nicely.
Its one of the things we would like to improve, but never got to do it.

Unless you do the fade in after it'd pop into existence at the moment? Or am I missing something obvious here

Yes it would marginally reduce view distance, but still better than just having them pop in.

[Falcrack]

It has also to do with "zones", which are not exposed to the player. These are cubic volumes in which stuff is rendered.
Your current zone and the nearby zones are used for "culling" away things further away. Each cube is i think 70km in lenght. So at maximum you can see an asteorid 140km away, at minimum 70?
Thats at least my basic understanding of it.
Stations are by the way excluded of this culling, as we know where they are and how they look like.
Asteorids gets created on the fly, as far as i know. We dont save the locations of each and every asteorid you encounter.

Speaking of asteroids generating on the fly, it is my experience that the regions the game identifies as having resources based on resource probes, and the asteroids generated in those regions of space, do not always nicely correlate. For example, I visit regions of space where there are clearly a lot of silicon or ore probes, yet when I drop a resource probe, it indicates no silicon or ore. The quantity of asteroids containing those minerals based on resource probe data does not always correlate with the visible quantity that I see. Can this issue be looked at?

Also, asteroids "popping up" seems like while it could be solved by some algorithm that as asteroids come into existence, they "fade in" rather than abruptly "pop in". They would still be popping up, but it would not be so jarring on the eyes.

[LameFox]

I think the trouble is that a big asteroid is so big that when popping in at 70km or greater it still looks kind of like a bunch of birds hit your windscreen. I'm tempted to say that some atmospheric perspective on the asteroids would help, but that might annoy more people than it satisfied in the end, since there's not really an atmosphere.

On the other hand, it's partly the fault of the pretty but unrealistically light backgrounds that they're so obvious in the first place, so I think something like that would fit thematically if not scientifically.