LOD radius affects how quickly the mesh and texture resolution drops as you get farther from the camera.

 

Mesh resolution controls the maximum resolution which appears around the player.

 

Mesh Complexity basically controls how quickly it will reduce the number of triangles in flatter areas of the terrain.

If the numbers match up to FSX and peeking at files and their sizes, MeshResolution=22 would be for 10m, which Hawai'i appears to be. Alaska appears to be 38m, same as FSX. Changing MeshResolution to a higher number wouldn't (shouldn't?) have any effect within the game.

The mesh resolution and complexity numbers are the same as FSX so you are correct there.  The LOD radius is different though.  We changed how the radius was calculated so a 2.5 in Flight is around the same as a 3.5 in FSX.

Does LOD affect mesh display? I thought it was just texture display. It does make sense that above a certain number the cfg setting can't improve the mesh beyond the data that's in the base pack.

 

Also I'm wondering why the LOD values always seem to be in .5's. Why not whole integers?

The LOD affects both mesh and texture.  The LOD can be any floating point number.  There is no particular reason why we stuck to 0.5 other than prior habit I guess.

 

Well, after thinking about it, there may be some reason to it.  The center of the LOD radius  is based off the player's position, but it is snapped to the nearest grid cell center.  This means if you want a full 3 grid cells around you, you would need the LOD to be 3.5 so that it covers the half cell between the center of the cell you are in to it's edge, and then 3 additional cells beyond that.

stonelance, on 04 May 2013 - 08:05 AM, said:

Well, after thinking about it, there may be some reason to it. The center of the LOD radius is based off the player's position, but it is snapped to the nearest grid cell center. This means if you want a full 3 grid cells around you, you would need the LOD to be 3.5 so that it covers the half cell between the center of the cell you are in to it's edge, and then 3 additional cells beyond that.

I might have seen this mentioned over the years, but if I did it's been forgotten! When you say "cell(s)", does this correlate to one of the QMID/LOD boundaries as outlined in the older SDKs?

Yup

stonelance, on 04 May 2013 - 4:39 PM, said:

Yup

Thanks! But that leaves me with more questions. Which QMID/LOD does the term "cell(s)' apply to or... does increasing the radius in game cause an increase in the number of cells being read or does it adjust the size of the cells that are being read?

It applies to all of them.  The mesh and texture resolution settings control what QMID level is the highest detail at the center near the player.  Every "LOD radius" number of cells from the user it drops one QMID level, which reduces the resolution by 4 (each lower QMID level is twice the size along each edge, but the texture\mesh applied to it is the same as the higher detail levels, which works out to a reduction in overall resolution of 4 per QMID level).  This continues away from the user until you reach the opposite side of the world.

 

So basically if the texture resolution is 22, and LOD radius is 3.5 you get a circle of radius 3.5 cells at QMID level 22 from the user.  Then past that you have a circle of radius 3.5 cells at QMID level 21 from the user, then 20, 19 etc. until the whole world is covered.

 

None of this matters if you just want to change the settings though.  Just know that the resolution settings is the highest resolution near the user, and the LOD radius controls how quickly the falloff is as you get farther from the user.