Anyway to Extend the 'Magic Circle' on PC?

[cwattyeso]

I'm finding more and more often these days, due partly to the number of really great maps that keep getting released by very talented mod authors that I'm getting annoyed as a PC Player with how bad the game actually looks on the platform, and how it pretty much seems to be a Console Game that doesn't even take advantage of or maximise the capabilities of my PC System.

The thing that is bugging me more and more now as I play on these wonderful user maps is that horrid 'Magic Circle' that appears around your vehicles, where the game only loads in the good looking textures, and outside or beyond that circle still leaves the absolute garbage looking stuff.



Try as I may to manually edit and extend my game settings beyond the limits set by the in-game options, I can't do anything to remove this horrid effect.

Sure I can push my view distance and render distance to incredible limits that I can eventually slow my FPS to single figures, however there doesn't seem to be any settings to increase the radius of this circle, or disable it completely and just make the game load the good textures as far as the eye can see on the map.

Will this ever be something Giants look at fixing?

[asyvan]

What? This is easy.
Just enter advanced graphics settings, bump the distance to max (200%). Then edit the game.xml and bump the coeff values to between 3-4 depending on your GPU.

[cwattyeso]

I'll give it a shot, I admit I have changed these settings on my PC, but all seems to do so far is extend the view distance, but not necessarily improve the quality of the textures at that new distance.

[TurboJ]

Can someone confirm which value in the game.xml is the correct one to edit. The circle effect is super annoying and totally unnecessary for a medium spec PC.

[asyvan]

Change X to something larger than 2.
I believe what you want to change is the the terrainLODDistanceCoeff.
But the other values below also affects view distances for other things.

Code: Select all

     <viewDistanceCoeff>X.000000</viewDistanceCoeff>
     <lodDistanceCoeff>X.000000</lodDistanceCoeff>
     <terrainLODDistanceCoeff>X.000000</terrainLODDistanceCoeff>
     <foliageViewDistanceCoeff>X.000000</foliageViewDistanceCoeff>

[bojanh66]

This one
<foliageViewDistanceCoeff>2.000000</foliageViewDistanceCoeff>

[TurboJ]

Thanks guys! The objects visible on the fields indeed do seem to utilize the 'foliage' setting rather than the 'lod' one. At least it seems that way. Gonna continue testing.

[Stryder87]

I've changed those settings on my machine up to 6 for each one and, while it did make some difference, I still had that weird straight black line that shows up every so often right in front of my machine as I'm driving (I like the camera pulled up and behind the vehicle quite a ways), the circles were still there, just a little further out, and the stuttering increased a LOT, especially the further out I pulled the camera and the more there were distant fields in view (which made sense since the stutter seems to be a rendering issue, especially with shadows).

I dropped the numbers to 4 for a while and still would have the stuttering (and the circles were closer in again). I've finally settled on 3 for each and just leave it. It's not a functional gameplay problem, just cosmetic, so I'll just live with it. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[bojanh66]

Ah, i see, there is a 2nd foliage distance, which is not available in game settings.
for this one, u need to change view distance for each crop separately in their xml files.
xml files for each crop are available in Data/Foliage/cropname.xml
line for what u are looking is this:

<foliageLodDefaults lod="0" viewDistance="20" blendOutDistance="2" atlasSize="1" atlasOffset="1 0" texCoords="0 0 1 1" />
<foliageLodDefaults lod="1" viewDistance="80" blendOutDistance="2" atlasSize="1" atlasOffset="1 0" texCoords="0 0 1 1" />

where it says viewDistance = 20, change that 20 to 80 and save file...repeat process for every crop.

This will affect number 2 on the picture, while foliageDistance in game settings will affect number 1 on the picture.

[bojanh66]

As you can see, i had same problem, so i opened same topic few weeks ago, but no one was able to help me, so after some experiments with game file, i came to conclusion that view distance in crops xml files is responsible for this 2nd foliage distance.
viewtopic.php?f=963&t=154474&p=1201911#p1201911

I wish we had that option in game, so we dont need to mess with xml files in Data folder.

Giants, learn something from this and make it available in FS 21, because people are bothered with this problem.

[cwattyeso]

Awesome input from everyone here. I have made adjustments to the values in the game.xml, balancing better visuals with still maintaining a high frame rate. I've also modified all the individual crop and what have you xmls in the data folder. Will be interesting to see the effect next time I boot up the game. One thing to consider when changing the crop xmls, is to then check which map your playing and if playing a mod map, check that doesnt have its own crop xmls which will overwrite the ones the data folder. You might have to edit the ones in the map as well.

[bojanh66]

Thats correct.
For example, since i play mostly on Oakfield, changing grass.xml view distance in Data/Foliage folder changed nothing, because Oxygendavid has his own grass.xml built into map, so you have to change grass.xml in Oakfield.zip folder

[Noraf]

Wouldn't this also mess up mp?

[bojanh66]

I dont know, i did not try to play Oakfield in MP.

[cwattyeso]

If you edit a map, and all players and the server use this version of the map then it won't mess up multiplayer. As for changing files in the games data folder. I have done this for many things including vehicles and have had no problems playing multiplayer. I cant rule out that some things only I see changes in or differences in from a client side.