Advanced Question Ugly Angular Earth

[Morgan]

Is there a way to prevent the earth from looking muddy and blocky at far distances?

For example, I noticed that at a certain distance after lets say; trans lunar insertion, the earth will take on a rather rough shape. The atmosphere will disappear, and the overall shape becomes ugly.

 

[fsci123]

Yes believe it or not, orbiter simulates natural disasters and when you see a blocky earth it is a sign that the world is slowly being compressed by an internal black hole.

 

[PhantomCruiser]

What is your screen resolution? I understand the "blocky" but I don't understand the "muddy"?
It's a bit smoother with D3D9, have you given that a try?

 

[jedidia]

Which textures do you have installed? the tessalation of the mesh is directly related to the texture level, so that might be a factor.

 

[RisingFury]

Doesn't Orbiter reduce the poly count of the planet from a distance?

 

[statickid]

I have personally never this behavior. Indeed, I know the atmosphere disappears somewhere halfway to the moon, but even on the moon and beyond the Earth looks nice and round when the FOV is all zoomed in for me.

EDIT:

Okay I just checked it out. when I zoom in, It does look rather polygonal around from 20<FOV<30. However, above 30 its too small to really make a difference, then when it gets to 20 degrees, the atmosphere actually turns back on and the high res textures and smooth ball appearance return in full.

 

[Morgan]

It basically looses its atmosphere, and its round shape, looking really crummy Here's a comparison. FOV is at 50 degrees

If any of you have tested orbiter 2015 beta, you'll find that this doesn't happen. The earth keeps its shape and appearance from all altitudes.

I use the L11 earth textures as well as the hi res cloud mod from the hangar. Make sure you enlarge the images.

Here is the earth with its natural form... at 1920 x 1200

Then once I hit a certain distance, this happens...

This happens not even half way to the moon. A mere 196.8M in fact, and from the moon, the earth looks really bad.

 

[ISProgram]

I think this has also happened to me before, though I assumed it was normal because of aforementioned poly-count reduction Orbiter does.

 

[Morgan]

It happens to all Orbiter 2010 installations. Try it yourself. Which was why I was wondering if there was some config file I can edit to prevent/disable this loss of polygons as well as the horizon.

 

[BrianJ]

Which was why I was wondering if there was some config file I can edit to prevent/disable this loss of polygons as well as the horizon.

Look in your Orbiter.cfg (in the main Orbiter directory) and try increasing the "PlanetPatchRes" parameter.

From the OrbiterConfig.pdf:

PlanetPatchRes (Float)
Texture resolution bias for planet surfaces. Range: 0.1 to 10. Higher values produce higher resolution planetary surfaces at a given apparent radius, but reduce performance. Default: 1.0

Cheers,
Brian

 

[statickid]

Makes perfect sense for apparent radius. It means that for me on the moon, with an FOV of 20, the default setting will resume high quality rendering because the apparent radius of Earth is big enough. cool!