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xtomdl LOD problem

W

Wojciech Neubauer

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3
Country
poland
I have a question,

I Recently started playing with the fsx sdk. I setup the environment and built my first object. Everything seemd to work fine until I tried to create a few LODs. I created 3 boxes each assigned to different LOD (I tried 10, 50, 100 and 100, 200, 400). Much to my surprise FSX SP2 didn't recognized the different boxes. Regardless of the the distance to the object it remained the same. I was investigating a little and compiled the same .x file obtained from the exporter using sdk from fs2004. Voila, everything in worked fine the further from the object FSX swapped the boxes as expected. This suggested problem with the xtomdl converter. I investigated the MDL file and it seemed to have three LOD sections inside with the proper LOD information. Now I am at a loss. Do any of you guys noticed that there is something wrong with the LOD handling ?

Thanks a lot
 

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Hi,

There is a little problem in SP2 that it only uses the highest LOD when batching scenery objects together to improve performance. So I guess that is what you are seeing here.
 
Thanks for your answer, I am glad to hear that I am not the only one with a flawed Flight Simulator :)
For the past few days I was experimenting with both FSX SDK and FS2004 SDK. I definitely couldn't make FSX draw LODs different than the greatest one (objects created with FS2004 SDK worked quite well). I don't understand how Microsoft could have missed it. Fixing it should further improve FSX performance with more complex scenes. The second possibility is that sorting and dealing with all those different LODs takes more time than simply displaying more complex objects.
I am still wondering if the issue is present in earlier versions too? if not do you think it is worth uninstalling SP2 and comming back to FSX SP1? Does FSX with SP1 perform better?

Thanks again
Wojtek
 
Hi,

This should be a SP2 issue only. In SP2 MS added the "object batching" functionality that collects all drawcalls with the same materials (also if they are part of different objects). This has improved the performance a lot.

On little problem that slipped in with this is that the LOD does no longer work. I have not fully tested it, but I think that for any object that uses the drawcall batching (so scenery objects placed with XML, autogen) the LOD system does not work currently.

So probably the performance would be even better if it works again, but the drawcall batching has improved the performance a lot. So SP2 should still be better than SP1.
 
Dear Arno:

Does "Object batching" functionality work with DirectX9 or just with DirectX 10?

Thanks.
Alfredo Mendiola Loyola
Lima Perú
 
Material Batching with SP2

Dear Arno:

Is there a way to use the "Material Batching" techniques on our 3ds max or Gmax Model?

Are there tips o turorials?

Thanks.
Alfredo Mendiola Loyola
Lima Perú
 
I think Arno meant the batching as the internal way of FSX executable to do the drawing. And such we do not have any control over it during modelling. The only implication of this algorithm improvments is FSX not handling multi LOD objects.
Wojtek
 
Hi Alfredo,

mendiola_loyola said:
Is there a way to use the "Material Batching" techniques on our 3ds max or Gmax Model?
Click to expand...

This is a feature in FSX, there is nothing you have to do in your model to "use" it.

But to take best effect from it, you need to make sure that the material settings used in your objects are as similar as possible.
 
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