Buildings should have an opacity that acts in a similar way to that of props in placed in hammer. For example: the fade start distance would be at 90-95% and the fade end would be at 100%.
i asume to reduce the pop-up effect? btw dz lod is based on screen space not distance so some might actually never see building lods. it would be so awesome to have draw distances increased to show all the map, on a local server this works with no issues an decent fps, but i guess as soon as theres a couple of players its gonna lag as hell ... ... apart of that youd notice how small empires maps actually are.
Yeah, I am also in favor of smoothly transitioning LODs in contrast to switching on the fly. (Unreal has done that pretty well, especially with textures.) I am just not sure Source supports this without too much of an effort. If you just want a building to fade out from it's final LOD, that shouldn't even have a performance impact. But if you want to smoothly transition between two, you basically have to render two LODs at the same time, impacting the performance.
Althought it'd be REALLY nice if someone made a couple of extra LOD's (for each building) so we could have smoother transitioning between the models
It also has to do with networking. If all entities are visible all the time, it means all of them are transmitted to all clients. The PVS system ensures that entities that aren't potentially visible to clients aren't sent. On crossroads, the enemy base isn't actually there if you're in your own base. I think that negating that system is going to have a significant impact on the amount of players a server can support.
yes i know its no option - tricksters mass LT rush on duststorm shows what would happen, and thats only been tanks - itd just be awesome.