LOD Control:
Ever since a specific (I think .19) update, we lost the ability to fine tune LODs for the landscape in exchange of a function that was promised to “provide better control”.
Ok, that would be great, except it doesn’t provide any better control then what it used to provide before, and it’s possibly worse.
Simply put, what we need is a way to Exclude LOD levels from ever rendering.
Say i’m using an 8k tile, for instance. I do not EVER want LOD0 to show up. ever.
Yet, because of the new system this isn’t possible.
To test, you can place your camera at the center of a component (in an 8km landscape the component size is huge). you will almost always end up having the LOD0 show up.
Why do I not want to get LOD 0 to show? simply put, Tris count.
Because of the sheer size of the individual component, LOD0 on a 8129x8129 tile degrades performance.
Tessellation:
Another option that we no-longer have (somewhat recently) is to turn off tessellation on the landscape.
IF using it or not using it did not come with a rendering cost I wouldn’t see an issue with this.
However, since there is A cost - however minimal - Why can we not disable it entirely? The choice should be ours…
Last thing I think needs a mention;
Importing tiled worlds:
It would be pretty simple to create a “tile type” object that contains the tile information to be used and applied during the import process.
Basically, injecting new settings into each tile as the engine imports them with the regular process.
This could very well be extended to include the X/Y/Z scale, so that one does not have to refer back to notes when importing batches of maximized amounts.
To be clear, the settings I’m interested in manipulating on *each *tile i import - as I import it - are ALL of the settings available within the LandscapeStreamingProxy component.
Aside from Adjusting LODs some tweaks that may be constant are tossing the landscape in a custom stencil. Adding a virtual texture, changing some lightmass settings, or enabling HLOD culling.
That said, Preferably would want this system extended to include the LOD generation settings. The tiles could be constructed with the presets for multiple tiles already set up so that all the user has to do is click Generate and wait for the meshes to be created.
Anyway, Just a few nuts and bolts to add to make the system - and living with it - much more user friendly.
If anyone has other workflow suggestions/improvements I’m all ears.