[REL] The Little Ships of SH5 - Coaster Pack

[kapuhy]

Originally Posted by gap

Do guns disappear at LOD distance? If they do, light equipment will disappear as well. If not, I don't see why they should behave in a different way than any other equipment. Depending on their size and on screen resolution they might become so small that the game won't render them, but this is not LOD-related.

I'll dig out my old test mod for this and write more then, as I said I'm not sure of details now.

EDIT: Ok I found it. Video below shows the issue:



One of my coasters, with Mk.9L Shining Depth Charges strapped to its bridge, using emissive material modeled after control room lightbulbs (your idea ). Light disappears even before LOD switch. It's hard to see in this video but crew figures remain visible even after lights do not.

Originally Posted by gap

Weird. Does that apply only to minesweepers? Have you tried if switching unit type solves the problem?

Any ship I tried to use more than one AO map on. On the other side I know it does work properly on Flower corvette (which has several AO skins in TWoS). So either it's a mistake I repeated in all my ships or maybe something resulting from using GR2 Editor (which would also explain why multi-AO stock ships are unaffected).

[gap]

Originally Posted by kapuhy

I'll dig out my old test mod for this and write more then, as I said I'm not sure of details now.

Okay, I will look forward to your updates

Originally Posted by kapuhy

Any ship I tried to use more than one AO map on. On the other side I know it does work properly on Flower corvette (which has several AO skins in TWoS). So either it's a mistake I repeated in all my ships or maybe something resulting from using GR2 Editor (which would also explain why multi-AO stock ships are unaffected).

mmm... in that case I lean to believe that ship type has nothing to do with your problem, but just to be sure, you could set up your unit as a corvette (or any other unit type which has multiple AO maps assigned) and see if that makes any change.
On the other hand, if the culprit was GR2 editor I would expect the primary AO map to be broken as well as the others, but this is not the case obviously

[gap]

Originally Posted by kapuhy

EDIT: Ok I found it. Video below shows the issue:



One of my coasters, with Mk.9L Shining Depth Charges strapped to its bridge, using emissive material modeled after control room lightbulbs (your idea ). Light disappears even before LOD switch. It's hard to see in this video but crew figures remain visible even after lights do not.

Okay, thank you for sharing this video. I think I know what's going on.
In SH5 the visibility of distant objects is proportional to the dimensions of its bounding sphere. I noticed that while working on the model of a sea stack near Helgoland; its visibility was toggled off way before the one of other nearby terrain objects, and I couldn't discover what was causing that until I increased its size. I don't know if that applies only to terrain objects (and possibly any object imported in the GR2 file of stock terrain objects) or to every non-unit object though.

Try doing this: import your lights in a stock equipment file. One of the GR2 files where depth charges, bombs, or torpedoes are stored, should fit our needs. If that doesn't make your lights visible from a longer distance, switch to any GR2 file with two (or more) meshes on the same object. Use one of the meshes for storing your lights, make the other mesh invisible, import a big object in it (a huge single-faced triangle will do), and see what's happening in game. I am pretty confident that at least one of the above methods will solve for good the issue documented in your video