Starship LOD issue with panel buttons
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Hi @Black-Square ,
In your flight with V1 I remembered how you mentioned (around 1:26:30) how the soft keys disappear from the panels due to aggressive LOD:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W83HsUJvqckHave you tried the trick where you add a larger invisible cube to the last LOD object so that it stays above 1% screen size (and of course also reduce to one material to make sure it doesn't exceed draw calls)? Even if you have a couple of dozen of these buttons it should be a pretty trivial change, I'm not sure if that's what you meant by "doing a whole bunch of changes to the models".
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Thanks for your thoughts on this. Adding the extra geometry would solve the problem, but I'm worried about mouse collision issues. Call me paranoid, but that's the only way I know how to be with software. I had one other idea for tricking the LOD system with object scaling, which I will try later. Unfortunately, even that small of a change will take probably an hour to propagate across the two simulators and make sure there were no mistakes with the model or materials.
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Thanks for your thoughts on this. Adding the extra geometry would solve the problem, but I'm worried about mouse collision issues. Call me paranoid, but that's the only way I know how to be with software. I had one other idea for tricking the LOD system with object scaling, which I will try later. Unfortunately, even that small of a change will take probably an hour to propagate across the two simulators and make sure there were no mistakes with the model or materials.
@Black-Square said in Starship LOD issue with panel buttons:
Thanks for your thoughts on this. Adding the extra geometry would solve the problem, but I'm worried about mouse collision issues.
What if you put the invisible box part completely behind the button? It’s probably ok if the box obscured by the panel, the button is visible so the object is technically (partly) in front, and I’m not even sure the sim culls it just because it looks obstructed to us. And yes, I would try it on one button first just to see if it works.
Oh, also if this button already is an object with LODs, the LOD0 doesn’t have to have the box, and that’s what you would be pressing (when it’s close enough to manipulate). The last LOD with the box would only exist when you’re far away and not pressing the button.
Another idea: you could also try to trick it with something tiny like a single vertex, or maybe even by putting the object origin far away (that last one I’m not sure).
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I must admit, it feels a bit strange to be taking such spectacular advice on quite specific development details from someone on this forum!
I tried my trick today, and thankfully it worked. It's a clean solution for most small objects, but breaks down for animated hierarchies. We're going to ask Asobo to do something about this. After careful review today, this issue affects so many components in my aircraft, producing tiny artifacts in some lighting conditions that there is no way I could apply a fix to everything, just to produce something that looked better in MSFS 2020.
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Hopefully you can use it strategically on a few heavy hitters that irritate your OCD and the less annoying ones can wait for the real Asobo fix. Maybe it’s only worth using on a handful that you see all the time.
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That's exactly what I've done. I'm happy to do it, but I thought I would also share that it was two hour endeavor to...
Experiment, export, make the changes, export, find out they weren't enough, export, find more small objects, export, test in MSFS 2020, copy all changes to the release builds, test in MSFS 2024, test in MSFS 2020...
That's how these tiny changes can add up to days of work very quickly. It's really the exporting that takes the most time. It's worth it to satisfy my OCD, but I also share just so those most interested in my products might understand why I can't implement every change requested of me, no matter how much I want to.
Thanks again! It feels great to eliminate even one more MSFS 2024 issue.
