Do Terrain Objects - LOD Size actually work?
 

Hello, I am using SH4 Gold Edition 1.5, stock right now.

I must say that my video card (an old AGP X800 XT) and CPU are not the best, nor is my 1GB memory a healthy amount. But I can run SH4 fairly well in most situations. (Windows XP Pro).

It is when I am at a heavily terrain-populated port like Surabaya, (in a sub that has a rotating radar antenna), that things get unacceptably "jerky" at about 9-10 FPS when I'm looking backwards from the sub's bridge towards the land. (and yes, I use the "rotate the view 360 degree trick to load things in)..

I have adjusted the LOD and Objects down to nothing, but have not seen trees or buildings disappearing or lessening in number. And my FPS do not change at all. In another favorite program of mine (Trainz), when moving the "draw distance" sliders, I easily see fewer trees, buildings, railroad tracks and so on. And the frame rate increase is obvious.

Do the LOD and Terrain Objects adjustments in SH4 work like this for you people?

Thanks, Bob P.

I'm not absolutely certain, so maybe somebody can clarify/correct this but, I think those settings can only be changed at the beginning of a career while inside the Home Port office. It should work once it's been changed. However, if you return to the Graphics Settings menu and the sliders are still where you've last moved them to, it should take effect, and w/o having to be in Home Port.

Try turning off your radar when close to port, that helps quit a bit. Just don't forget to turn it back on. :damn:

It's more the AI controlled items that slow down the system.
The terrain objects do as well but there is nothing you can do about that.

Magic

Thanks Wernher and Magic,

I tried turning off the radar, and the FPS did go up to about 11-12. It did make a difference.

I read further in threads here about making the graphics changes in the Home Port Office room. (For the German campaign it is in the filing cabinet in the room)...

After I changed it there, my FPS while leaving Surabaya went down to 5-6,(a really horrible situation), much of last night I tried in vain to get it back to my normal 9-10 and did not succeed !!

Computers and computer programs, you gotta love them !!!! :rotfl2:

Thanks anyway fellas. My opinion is that (on my computer), those LOD and Terrain Object sliders do not work! Bob P.

You notice it is the radar that's causing all that lag, when you realize that your TC while aproaching to port is always reduced when a new ship is sighted in radar.

If you enter 'Options' under Graphics Settings, there's a drop-down box at the top.
This lets you choose between High, Medium and Low settings.


However you may also open "your documents\SH4\data\GFXSettings.cfg" and edit the settings in there.

Standard settings are as follows:

High Setting:
UnderwaterDispMap=1
Ship3DDamage=2
CharacterDetail=1
ParticlesDetail=10
TerrainObjectsDensity=8
TerrainObjectsLODSize=5

Medium Setting:
UnderwaterDispMap=1
Ship3DDamage=1
CharacterDetail=1
ParticlesDetail=8
TerrainObjectsDensity=5
TerrainObjectsLODSize=8

Low Setting:
UnderwaterDispMap=0
Ship3DDamage=0
CharacterDetail=0
ParticlesDetail=5
TerrainObjectsDensity=2
TerrainObjectsLODSize=10

It's easier to manipulate settings in the cfg-file and the above gives you an idea of which values will ease the burden on your card.
You may choose in-between values = user defined setting.

In Graphics Option enabling following values will take a big toll on your card/cpu:
- post processing filter
- glare
- lightshafts and
- volumetric fog

In you ATI control center you may want to play with AA as this is the number one FPS killer...


Oh, the values above may be manipulated at any time, but you'll need to load your save again for the changes to take effect, ie. you don't need to exit from SH4, but must be in the Main Menu.

Hello back to you people,

I haven't been back here for a day or two. I thought that this thread would be more or less be over. But I see a couple more answers from, Daniel and Jan ...

When I talked about turning off the rotating radar, I meant the graphics load from the actual physical rotating bridge antenna. That did help a bit, about two frames per second which was a noticible help in the frames rate when leaving Surabaya.

Jan, I went into my documents, and made sure that the object density was 2, and the LOD size was 10. This alone did not produce any difference. Then I went into the ATI video card control panel. Removing my usual 2x anti-aliasing did not help. Changing the AF (which I usually set at 4 these days) did not help.

What did help, by an increase of about 5 frames per second, was lowering my mipmap setting, which I usually keep at "quality" and still, the picture quality seemed quite good!.... until I went into the conning tower internal view, and the close-up dials were all blurry. I have always thought that "mipmap level" referred to long distance sharpness!!!

So, I returned the mipmap back to Quality. I must keep post-processing in the game "on" since it provides the deep colors that I like. Other settings in the game like Character Detail; 3D Ship Wakes; Ship Normal Maps; Caustic Efeffects, made no difference when I shut them off. It looks like I will have to live with this in Surabaya! However I am getting 9-10 FPS again, instead of the 5-6 I was stuck with a few days ago .....

I still think that the Distance sliders in the game are not properly done for the person with a weaker computer. Surabaya has a "deep" set of scenery. My opinion is that the slider should turn off the bay and ship and line of trees behind the town immediately, along with half the buildings, but it does not.

But Silent Hunter 4 is still a great game. And again, thoughts of newer hardware start creeping into my mind!! Thanks all !! :yeah: Bob P.

Dare I say that perhaps your GPU has reached the apex of it's capabilities? It's an AGP card at, what, 256MB? Also, unless I'm misunderstanding, 1GB of RAM doesn't do much to pick up any slack for the graphics card. Hopefully, your CPU is greater than a Pentium 4 and more on the dual/quad core rating, though that would be rare given an AGP slot for your graphics card.
ATI's All-In-Wonder X800XT came out in, was it 2005 or late 2004?:hmmm:

I'm afraid that all the tweaking in the world will not overcome this obstacle.

Wernher, my CPU (believe it or not) is a Sempron 64 2800+ single core,754 pin. Running (overclocked) at 2.2 Ghz. And yes, the X800 XT has only 256Mb of memory. (It's not an All-In-Wonder, though). And most of the time, I have only around 860mb of system memory left to run games on. Abit NF8-V2 is the motherboard.

You'd be amazed to see how this system runs games! Far Cry was one of my favorites for a couple of years. No trouble running it with 2x AA on and 8x AF; mipmap at highest quality. The game ran and looked very beautiful. (of course we are talking 1024x768 here) !! It actually runs SH4 most of the time beautifully, with maybe 18-19-22 FPS while leaving ports. not painful at all. Around 34 fps out at sea. In really gigantic battles with an insane number of ships, I do get some slow motion, but no slideshows. But of course, I can't use fog, or glare, or environ effects...

My funding is low, so right now I am thinking along the lines of Athlon II X2 3Ghz Regor. With maybe 2 Gigs of memory to start off. And either an HD5670 or a 5770<--(recommended by a friend here) for the graphics card. I will stay with my 17" CRT Trinitron monitor, at 1024x768 I suppose for a while. I'm supposing this stuff should increase my gameplay to a somewhat higher level...

Thank very much for your input, guys! Bob P.

Well I certainly meant no disrespect to your current PC and hope you didn't interpret it that way.;) BTW, I don't know what your finances are but I've added a few links to some very inexpensive gaming rigs. If it's a matter of convincing the wife, I always say that I need a more powerful computer to keep up with the newest Financial Organizing or Word Processing programs.:D:03:

http://www.tigerdirect.com/applicati...307&CatId=1887

http://www.tigerdirect.com/applicati...449&CatId=4928

http://www.tigerdirect.com/applicati...0970&CatId=114

Good luck, mate.:up:

I was kinda' surprised when my brand new ASUS laptop TDC'd at Midway. I always had all kinds of problems getting away from that place but I thought my new box would laugh at Midway...it crashed anyway.
It was so bad that I had to go back a save and use the other base on that atoll south of Midway (I can't think of the name right now) but all it is, is just a Sub tender and a sand bar. So, I'm done with Midway until I can find a way to shut down all of my mods and graphics, just to refit. The Question in my mind is, why all the problems with Midway, when Pearl acts just fine?! Pearl has twice the graphics that Midway does and I have to go to well over 1000TC to even have a hiccup.
Anyway, hope this adds some fuel to the mystery. I wish all the ports would act like Pearl Harbor (at least for me).
Good Hunting :salute:

Hey Jan,
Thanks for this info. I will need to check the way I was adjusting the graphics. I knew that some changes can be made immediately but I didn't know that so many of them required you to go to the main menu. This will probably help a lot.
Cheers :salute:
D40

Hello back to you Wernher!

No offense taken at all, (not even a tiny little bit), about this old timey computer of mine! I've been talking to people for a long time about it being about time for it to go. (to the spare room)(which is cold in the winter)..

I took a look at the computers you gave links to. I have done this before at Tiger Direct. There's also a highly rated guy on Ebay (who I've bookmarked) who probably makes a decent living selling those types of assembled midrange computers. he has the prices down in the $400 range. But without dedicated graphics card or OS, (or hard drive)!! so why am I mentioning him here???:rotfl2:

The one thing I've noticed about these computers is that they always scrimp on the video cards. A 5400 is a very low performance card. So you must pay $125 or some such price for an upgrade to a 5770 or whatever.

I think I've given up on that type of idea. My way of doing things (it seems) is to throw a decent $70 motherboard into my case with maybe a $60 AMD Cpu, and two Gigs of memory for a start, and an under $100 graphics card, and in my low budget kind of way, see if Windows XP will run on it. And also see if my 420 watt power supply will power it! If not, it will be time to buy Windows 7 and a power supply in the coming months!!

To Dogfish40, I have gone into and out of Midway, and the FPS hit was a little heavier than Pearl, I would say I get around 16fps, but still an enjoyable experience. Of course I am at 1024x768 and no fog, glare, environmental. No crashes.

Hope you can get your ASUS to do it with some adjustments!

By the way, you guys have been using the term "TC" My brain just has not been in gear lately. What is TC referring to? Thanks much!

Bob P.:rock:

Ok sailor let's get that brain in gear, there is a war on you know. :haha::haha:
Time Compression.

A good duel core AMD CPU and & 2 gigs with a decent vid card (512 memory at least) will run XP no problem and should give you a decent game FPS.
Obviously the bigger the better but what you can afford is the real point here.

Magic

Ah yes, Magic..

If you set the TC at 1000, you go into the future, as in H.G. Wells "The Time Machine".

You set it at 0 (zero) you actually stop time. Which I think Albert Einstein proved. Now I remember ....:hmmm:

Otherwise, I might be able to use my Windows XP . That is good.

I would be able to buy a 1Gig video card.

But now we are getting into hardware. Perhaps it's more correct to go there to talk about it.

Isn't there a DX9 frames-ahead reduction software in downloads here? I remember reading that it has helped people.

Well thanks fellas. Bob P.

I found it ....D3D9 Antilag .... Now to figure out how to use it !!

All this discussion about video cards, video settings etc, as useful as it indeed is, does not remove the fact that close to shore you really should bring the TC down a notch before you loose control of things. The same applies to heavy traffic areas, and specially so for eneny controlled territory. The TC alway slows down when action is afoot, but you can't count on it slowing fast enough for you to take action accordingly. It has happened to me sometimes to receive an 'enemy ship spotted' warning, along with the corresponding TC decrease, when a Destroyer was already firing at me.

The only way to avoid this? Lower your TC considerably when closer to hotter areas and enjoy the ride. ry to think of this as the simulation forcing you to stand watch painstakingly as a real like skipper would, instead of rising TC to 6000x to warp through the pacific ocean while you pick up some snacks!