One thing that has bothered me about X-Plane scenery is that the road draw distance is quite low. Only at the highest World Detail Distance setting is it high enough that you can actually trace roads in the distance. The problem with maxing out the draw distance is that objects and trees also have their draw distance increased, causing low frame rates over major cities and even shimmering and flickering objects/trees because the draw distance is unnecessarily high.

 

Surely it should be possible to render major roads fully with only a minor FPS hit, but since it's coupled to the object draw distance, there's no way to find out.

 

Is there any tweak or hidden cfg you can edit to increase the road draw distance only, while leaving the trees and autogen draw distance at a lower setting?

Managed to at least reduce the draw distance of trees independently by editing the settings.txt file. 

 

Buildings and road draw distances seem to be hard-linked however.

 

 

Buildings and road draw distances seem to be hard-linked however.

 

Depends on the object I think. With facades, the draw distance can be changed, but with objects, there doesn't seem to be a way to control its draw distance. Scenery designers create multiple LODs for each object, and this seems to be one way to control it to some degree.

Managed to at least reduce the draw distance of trees independently by editing the settings.txt file. 

 

Buildings and road draw distances seem to be hard-linked however.

 

Hi, Care to share please? I would like to know what settings you changed.

Thanks,

Hi, Care to share please? I would like to know what settings you changed.

Thanks,

 

X-Plane 10\Resources\settings.txt:

I simply copied everything from "SETTING_1 renopt_lod_50 2" into "SETTING_1 renopt_lod_50 4", making them identical except for "reno/LOD_bias_rat 1" which seems to control buildings *and* roads distances.

 

Great, thanks JimmiG!