God is in the details. Apparently.

[Isis]

It's not so much for the detail at range, is that some times games don't switch between the full size and LoD model fast enough.

[Schmung]

ah, gotcha. I know exactly what you mean. Rainbow Six Vegas 2 does that on my xbox. I assume it's a caching issue or somesuch so it just shows you the LOD until such a time as it can squeeze the thing into the cache or grab it from disc. I've seen it in a few other games as well. Not an issue at all with source as far as I know. You specify the distance at which LODs switch when you compiled the and it does it in-game. I've certainly not seen any instances of LOD models sticking around too long, so you've nothing to worry about there.

[Isis]

All righty then.

[Inveramsay]

AFAIK you cannot disable lods which is a good thing because even a modern pc would be struggling badly if there were no lods on any big scenes.

[DysPatch]

Well for those with lower end PCs, it really makes a difference. When you set your model and texture settings to low, typically you will only see the last LOD even if you are right next to it. That's at least how it works in Source.

[undertone]

Well for those with lower end PCs, it really makes a difference. When you set your model and texture settings to low, typically you will only see the last LOD even if you are right next to it. That's at least how it works in Source.

Ah, thats what happens. I thought it was just magic.

I'm not even kidding either. I thought there were magic spells written into the engine code. If you've ever worked with the engine you'd know this isn't really out to left field - the engine does strange and unpredictable things. It can be like performing spellwork. And not harry potter spells, im talking Gandalf style ones. You shall not pass mutha fucka.

[Inveramsay]

textures choose a lower mipmap level (or higher, whichever is crappier) as well

[drhubbler]

if thats the case, then the sr25 might look like shit in lod's then, there is almost no room for any sort of proper mipping as most the parts are less than a pixel or 2 away from eachother.

[Naota]

This is of course the reason why I save all of my first-person textures without mipmaps. Not only do I save quite a fair bit of space which is never used (unless the detail settings change the mipmaps, which I would think most people would want to be the last texture in the game to change with their detail level), but I don't have to worry about the mipmaps not showing up right. We really could save a good 10-20% of our overall weapon texture footprint by doing away with these absurd viewmodel mipmaps.

[drhubbler]

viewmodel mipmaps boost efficiency actually, and when used properly they can actually provide a better appearance to the texture itself.

[Naota]

Efficiency how exactly? Under standard HL2 settings you'll never see anything but the initial texture itself, and as it's a viewmodel it will never move far enough from your field of view to ever step down a different scale of mipmap. The only time I can see it doing anything at all is when a player changes the texture detail settings in the menu, in which case I would actually think the viewmodels should be the absolute last object on screen to undergo a resizing (L4D's weapons universally look like ass even under High settings for this very reason).

Forgetting that, it's not FPS or CPU performance we're strained for in the least with FAS, but texture memory. 25% off of every first person texture file's size is well worth the cost of a few frames per second, especially when for me FAS averages close to 140 FPS at any given moment, while TF2 and L4D sit at a rather sobering 30-40 almost all the time.

[DysPatch]

Yeah, I will say, FA:S is one of the few source games my shitty laptop can handle. I can't play TF2 because after 30 seconds my FPS hits rock bottom. But in FA:S, I can play for quite a while.

[Daishi2442]

That's kinda strange how a game that looks so much better plays so much better too. Is it because TF2 is the '07 engine and FAS is the ep1 engine?

[Inveramsay]

yes, not having the ep2 engine helps a lot with performance. Running vanilla hl2 engine worked fine on max on my old laptop, ep1 ran slightly worse but still fine, ep2 I needed to drop a considerable amount of things for it to run