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Flickering

F

froggy

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unitedkingdom
I have made a complex object with lots small parts and therefore lots of polys, when placed it into the scenery I get a flickering affect from the object. Is there any way to supress the flickering, and is there a way of assessing the when the number polys will begin have a detrimental affect of frame rates?

:scratchch
 
Hi,

What kind of polygons are flickering? If it are polygons on your object (like logos, etc) the solution is usually to give them a zbias. If they are ground polygons the problem is usually that they are placed with the wrong code/techniques.
 
Hi Arno,

The polys/parts/object all have simple solid colour textures but is made into a kind of lattice work similar to a tower. There are 6080 vertices and 4560 polys in each object and three objects. How do I give them a zbias?
 
Giving something a zbias is done on polygon basis normally (the material you apply gets a special name), not on an object basis. With the amount of polygons you are talking about, I am wondering if the zbias option is the best solution. It sounds more like the flickering is caused by something else in your model.
 
I better get the manual out and read up on zbias. Any suggestions what that other something could be?
 
I am no FSDS expert, so can't tell you where to find the zbias option. All I know is that MakeMDL supports it, so hopefully FSDS can make use of it.

It is hard to tell the cause of the flickering without actually seeing it. There are a few things that come to my mind:

  • Polygons on top of each other, without having the correct priority (solution: zbias)
  • Ground polygons (solution: don't create them as MDL objects, but tweak them so they get the correct layer)
  • A lot of very small polygons with different colors, from a distance this can result in a flickering effect because they get smaller than 1 pixel on screen and thus don't display steady (solution: LOD model)
  • Sort of moire partern in the textures you use (solution: it can help to edit the mipmaps of the texture manually)
 
I don't think FS2004 applies much (if any) antialiasing to scenery objects, so if you have a lot of small polygons these will cause a twinkling effect. It's similar to the Moire effect Arno mentioned, but may well be caused by the object itself rather than its texture.

Chris
 
Thanks all, at least I now know what moire and antialiasing are, after I'd looked them up! Seems like I've just got too many small parts/polys and I need an engineering re-assessment.

;)
 
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