✔️ FIXED BUG: F-22 vanishes at medium distance

[Krishty]

The F-22 disappears when you are more than ca. 150 meters away from it.

DID hard-coded this into the shape. I guess this is how they made their LOD work: When moving away, make the most detailed shape shut itself down automatically, and make a less-detailed shape enable itself automatically.

TFXplorer does not use the less-detailed shapes, but it now seems that is absolutely has to.

[Krishty]

The issue is even worse.

The main F-22 shape f22simp2.3 vanishes at a distance of 248-ish units.

After that, I do switch to a lower LOD – f22clus1.3 (and its variations in camouflage).

This however, vanishes at a distance of 250 units. It extends visual range by just two (2) units.

I could instead use f22simp2.3, which only vanishes above 300 units. Still, that’s 800 meters – for a flight simulator, that’s gunning range. And your target just disappears?!

I’m checking if maybe I may have misunderstood the distance markers in the shape header. Maybe 100, 200 does not mean “display the first LOD at up to 100 units, and the second at up to 200 units” but “… at up to 100+200 units”? That 3D-Ware guy was a brilliant programmer, and that interpretation would remove a degree of freedom from the files, which would be good.

[Krishty]

Very interesting. All other planes render at distances of up to 1000 units – only the F-22 disappears at 300. Clearly, your wingmen don’t just disappear at this range. Is there a hidden F-22 model that the game uses?

Edit: Started a mission and headed for an F-22. It appeared at 0.8 NM, i.e. 600 in-game units.

That is exactly twice as much as the header says.

[Krishty]

I multiplied with 2 (like ADF/TAW seems to do) and factored in the meters-to-DID-units conversion, which may have been wrong. Altogether, the F-22 is now visible five times the distance.

That’s still too little for a modern game, but it feels much like ADF/TAW. It also feels like cheating. Which is probably what DID did when they noticed that their LODs don’t hold up to “modern” resolutions like 800×600.

I hate it, but it’s good enough it’s enough for now.

[mikew]

f22.ssd may be involved when there are multiple models for the same object. I don't remember the details, but we were discussing this in 2012.
https://web.archive.org/web/20220402064 ... ssd-files/
My post of Sep 27th theorizes that some decision about which model is displayed is based on damage, but distance would make more sense. Whether any of that is till relevant, I have no idea...

[Krishty]

The “good enough” solution is now in the repo. Fixed.