Hi, I'm the Technical Director on the Engine Team at Rare.
Firstly, I wanted to address a few key points:
- The optimisations we’ve made in the patches have been non-destructive algorithmic improvements made by our Rendering Wizards. We’ve not made any changes to intentionally degrade graphical fidelity, on any platform.
- Our streaming system has always loaded the high detail versions of the islands at the same distance on all platforms. This avoids any gameplay imbalance caused by players on higher-specification PCs being able to see things that players on some dual core laptop with a couple of gig of RAM can't. The screenshots on this thread are either far-off islands with their lower-fidelity LOD (level of detail) loaded or higher-LOD islands where the view is not close enough to display the highest-detail terrain. The second scenario is one where we are investigating a potential improvement for platforms running a higher detail level.
- The rate at which an island streams in is variable and hardware dependent. If the game is installed on a mechanical disk then the fragmentation of that disk and the layout of the game files on the disk will have an impact on the speed of loading. Differences in loading speed due to this or other I/O work the system is doing will cause the higher detail LOD to appear at different distances.
However, we take any reports of issues from the community seriously, and we've taken a little time to look into the data around this.
This is the distance in meters from the island at which we make the high detail LOD available – this example is Devil’s Ridge, and the data is taken from Xbox One players on the retail game. There’s no change in the average distance at which we make the island visible across the title’s lifetime. This consistency is the same for all islands on the game, and across all percentiles. The distance you see in game will not always be this value - there is considerable variance dependent on what other loading the I/O system is doing at the time - but any trends would be visible.
The optimisations we’ve made should not cause any change to the appearance of the game. If you notice any significant changes for the worse, then it’s definitely unintentional and we’d want to fix it! For any specific problems, we’d appreciate any detailed information you can give us! Submit a support ticket with screen-shots, and what hardware/quality settings you’re running with.