FE2 terrain objects drawing distance

[Dornil 58]

Hi!

I just installed seasonal tiles by Jan Tuma into FE2 and at close range terrain looks excellent. But at a distance the terrain objects (trees, houses, etc.) pop up and disappear quite suddenly so it doesn't look nice from medium altitude. How do I:

1. Increase the drawing distance of those objects?

2. Make them fade gradually instead of suddenly disappearing?

[33LIMA 972]

Not sure if it will work for Jan Tuma's terrain but it did for stock FE2 terrain - I hated the way towns in particular had this hard edge where the drawing range could be seen, much too close, even at highest graphics settings.

 

Take a backup copy, then edit in Wordpad or similar the file (in your mods folder ) FLIGHTENGINE.INI, as follows

 

Look for the series of blocks for each graphics setting that start 'XXXDetailOption' (where XXX is Low, Med, High or Unlimited, corresponding to the graphics option settings).

 

Change the value of DetailMeshSize for the setting you use, to a bigger number - I have 18 set for all my options. Shown at bottom is the block for medium setting. I had used 22 but 18 seems to be enough, so that I no longer notice the draw in of ground objects. Save and test.

 

I don't recall if the pic below was taken with 22 or 18, but stock, before the file edit, I would have been able to see a zig-zag far edge to the towns that are visible; instead, with the edit, buildings in towns are drawn out as far as the horizon blur, making the draw-in pretty well invisible.

 

 

 

Hope this helps!

 

[MedDetailOption]
HorizonDistance=12000.0
DetailMeshSize=18
DetailLevel=1
WaterEffect=1
NoiseTexture=0
MaxTextureRes=256

[+mue 707]

To enable fading terrain objects in FE2 you can try this: http://combatace.com/topic/86103-fading-tod-objects/

[33LIMA 972]

I thought the 'terrain objects not fading like they used to' issue was introduced by an SF2 patch later that the final FE2 one - in other words, wasn't an issue for FE2.

[Dornil 58]

Thank you, 33LIMA! Increasing the mesh detail did help, although at the cost of some performance loss. 

I tried the shader solution, but it did not change anything for me. I'll try again later in case I did something wrong.