New Limits from Seasons (ep5)

[MaximilianPS]

After some tests i can say that they have reduced the range of rendering of the trees present on the hood.

The game will not make to see all you the trees that there are in the neighborhood, that will ignore the the parameter "clip", but many but many less . This limitation comes only applied to the trees.
It is known, Antennas, Parabolas, and objects particular as the beacons or the palaces will remain however visible, but you can forget also covered hills to you of plants.



the triangle represents the view camera, it's indicative just in order makes to understand you where I'm watching.
The trees marked in green are those that enter in the new range, while the once in red will not be never visible 'cause they are out of "tree-render-range", although the editing of LiveCamera.txt


another view..


another test..
at this point i don't think it's about an number of the tree but a range of camera, the game render the trees just when at the correct distance from the camera... or the used lot


so, if anyone know how to fix this frikin' limitation will be considered a new Hero 

[Lorelei]

There are camera and lighting mods at MTS2.

[MaximilianPS]

yes but the camera mod on mts2 are old, and also, they work just on "clip" parameter, exactly as my mod, but this will not solve the "tree limitation" 

[Ellatrue]

I remember there was another person with this problem, but so far my searching for it has turned up nothing, I think because after the problem was fixed they modified their first post to read "thanks, problem solved," instead of letting it remain easily searchable.

[witch]

there was something that could be typed at the command prompt from memory - about enabling view of the foliage or something...

[eevilcat]

The clip distance will be the furthest distance that anything is drawn, at the far limits this is likely to only be terrain. It sounds like EA have (sensibly) categorised neighbourhood decorations by type, the expectation being that there will be far fewer 'unique' items like you mentioned so the game can afford to render them further in the distance. The great temptation with trees is for designers to chuck as many of them on a terrain as possible as they look pretty, however this can easily cripple frame rate. As we now have weather/seasons in the Seasons neighbourhood view I'd guess that EA made a performance trade-off between the amount of trees they draw on screen and having pretty weather effects. As it appears that trees are categorised separately I'd do some searching for command line options along those lines, maybe look on some of the SC4 boards (assuming the two games share more than just the terrain file format).

[MaximilianPS]

It sounds like EA have (sensibly) categorised neighbourhood decorations by type...

u got the point, i've searched alot inside the many file present inside the config folder, but actually none talk about trees or foliage <_<

[Kralore]

After alot of searching on the net, I think this is the answer to your problem  http://bbs.thesims2.ea.com/community/bbs/messages.php?&openItemID=&threadID=908c2d99b95dfb86caffe8739964d78a&directoryID=148&startRow=1#b26198c0799a7886e905095f70406d81

Adding boolprop dontMergeNHFlora false to your userstartup.cheat will fix the tree problem.  I think this maybe specific to certain video cards though because i checked my system and in my game dontMergeNHFlora defaults to true and I can see all the trees at a very long distance. But hopefully this is the solution to your problem.

Apparently there is a bug in seasons that is supposed to get fixed at some point.

Also I couldn't seem to find the previous thread that was posted here by someone who described the same problem, (I do remember seeing it quite awhile back) but i'm almost 100% sure that boolprop dontMergeNHFlora false was the solution given there as well.

[Li'l Brudder]

Congratulations!  You've identified something that we have known about since the release of Seasons!

[MaximilianPS]

i'll try is sonner as possible but i think u get it
thnx alot

//** EDIT **\\
there is a realy cool cheat

UnitProp Lotskirtsizeincrease 0 /100
this will reduce / remove / improve the usage of the fog !
this is a totally new discover for me, and i'm pretty exalted, 'cause with the param. 100 you can see wole hood !!
side by side ! ... amazing, i can see the world from the window of my house