LOD algorithm and Ground Vehicles.

[Pongo]

It is interesting the the terrain Level of Detail model in AH penalizes ground vehicles.  Since all relevent detail will be hidden from an observing player looking at long range at a ground vehicle the GV stands out like a sore thumb at long ranges. It is sometime quite comical to advance towards a clearly visible target and have him disapear behind cover as it is rendered.
Two ground vehicles will be able to see each other not based on any real line of sight rules..but by who happens to be farthest from any interceding obsticle.

Of couse obsticles dont help GVs vs aircraft at all...which is the opposite of their real value.

dont know how to change it. Cause you dont want to have FPS drop for everyone.
But maybe never show a dot for an enemy if you wouldnt render the obstacles arround them.
Or line of sight cannot be farther then the render distance for detail.
Its definalty out of wack right now...

[Shiva]

Originally posted by Pongo
It is interesting the the terrain Level of Detail model in AH penalizes ground vehicles.  Since all relevent detail will be hidden from an observing player looking at long range at a ground vehicle the GV stands out like a sore thumb at long ranges. It is sometime quite comical to advance towards a clearly visible target and have him disapear behind cover as it is rendered.

It also has a serious effect on gameplay -- since IIRC your hits are determined by your FE and then passed up to the server to go to your target's FE, your opponent can get a clean shot at you and shoot right through the tree in front of you that will completely block any shots you fire back at him[/u].

The problem is that you can spot, shoot at, hit, and kill a GV at ranges well beyond the view limit for ground objects; any solution would have to either draw trees out to the maximum range of a Tiger's 88mm gun (max horizontal range of an 88mm FlaK 36/37 was just over nine miles, IIRC, but I doubt the Tiger's gun can elevate far enough to reach that range) or reduce the visibility range for vehicles down to the same limit as for terrain objects (not a solution, because that unfairly hampers realistic engagement ranges).

The only thing I can think of to fix it is that, as it stands now, I believe that trees are rendered as a pair of flat textures intersecting at 90° to each other (creating an odd effect in the case of the palm trees on Mindanao). If your FE would switch to displaying trees as single texture polygons perpendicular to your sight line when beyond the current ground object view limit, it would reduce the load on the FE. I don't know if that's a viable solution; I'm pretty sure that rendering trees out to 6000 yards won't be practical.

Another solution that might work is LOD rendering -- one texture patch that's used out to the current range limit, a second that's used out to twice that far, a third out to twice as far again (and so on), with the detail in the texture (and hence the texture's size) getting smaller and smaller until you get out to a range longer than the tanks can shoot.

[Pongo]

They can start by not redering a dot that they dont render the detail for..IE if you cant see a tree at that range. You cant see a tank.
Then they could start trying to achieve reasonable ranges or rendering. IE no they probably cant render to 9km. But they could probably render to 3.5-4km wich would get 99% of tank engagements. And you shouldnt see ground vehicles dots at farther then 4000 meters-yards anyway.