A pet peeve of mine...

[CarLuver69]

It's quite clear that a lot of the guidelines to making cars never enforced the fact that LOD bodies are extremely important, especially when it comes to multiplayer matches. It's annoying to be playing with modded cars in MP and having a player get too far ahead of you (into the BODY_M or BODY_L/VL zone) and have their car disappear. WTF is up with that? Does it really take too much of people's time to simply copy BODY_H 3 times and have proper LOD bodies?

If I was a part of the MM2 modding back in the day, with the knowledge I have now, I would've spread the word around to other people about the importance of LOD bodies. My GTX has LOD bodies - why? Because it's the proper way to do things. If you can't make LOD bodies by copying an object a few times, that's just half assed. The LEAST you could do is make LOD bodies and attach the wheels to them so you don't have to copy a million different tire objects, but that's really up to the author. I left the wheels off the LOD bodies anyways.

Just wanted to throw this out there and maybe get some of you car authors thinking about this kind of stuff. This ESPECIALLY goes to the authors who lock their work.

/rant

[RacingFreak]

Yes, totally agree with you. In fact, it's not that hard making a release to look properly, just copy the main LOD and rename it...

[whoami]

OK! I'll do that on my Miura.

[sajmon14]

I always hated that on HQTM cars and some brazillian ones. Really annoying on multi or when want make a zoomed-out picture for example

[StanOfGB]

That actually does not work with all models, and it works best with lowww poly ones (such as your GTX). I tried doing it with my very first car but even from a distance, the only parts that still showed were the wheels and the painted body parts (interior and bottom of the car disappeared). So it's not worth it if it only works for some cars and not others, IMO.

[Triple_X]

also not every car that we release has different LODs available when we get it , usually they have only the HQ LOD which making it how you say will cause major LAG for most of the players in MP games

[piau9000]

Well, all my cars have only the main LOD.
I don't play multiplayer so I don't find it important.
The lower LODs have low poly limits. So this method don't work very well on high poly models like the juiced 2 ones.

[dummiesboy]

That's one reason why basically everybody who plays CnR only uses default cars.

[CarLuver69]

This is the first time I've heard of the LOD bodies having poly limits, lol. I retract my statement about the "half-assed" part

[Franch88]

You're right in what you say CarLuver, but there are various reasons of why the LOD copies aren't made on some released cars. The LOD copies are needed to see the car at any distance, and so they're important more for the traffic cars and cop cars mods, and on cars made for the purpose to have only as opponents in races. On player cars they're kinda useless for the usual single player playing, and the multiplayer playing is something secondary.
The new converters don't know or don't care to do that in their works. An important thing is that the LOD copies of a pretty high polygons model will just make the .pkg file, and so the add-on .ar file, much bigger. With the LOD copies made form the BODY_H and wheels _H objects there's a too much high total polygons count kinda uselessly added just to have the car visible at farer distances; so, to have better LODs with less polygons is needed a little work or they have to be already provided with the converted model, and they need some attention and work too, anyway. I always do only the LOD _L copy (initially it was the _M one), it's enough to have the car always visible at any distance and isn't heavy on most of the models, but I don't know if is so in multyplayer gameplays, surely yes; the _M and _VL LODs are just to have two more different level of details. Dunno if the LOD copies have really a lower poylgons and vertices count limit than the _H model...

[dummiesboy]

I'd say the level of detail objects are pretty important for single player too. Many people use them for screenshots, and I can imagine that being an issue when trying to take a zoomed out shot.

And the LOD models don't have a polygon limit. There's actually a memory limit. When MM2 loads insanely detailed cars, they hog the memory like crazy. Trying to copy those insanely detailed models a few times will cause the game to go over its memory limit, and crash.

[piau9000]

I copied the BODY_H three times and renamed it.
Started the game and changed to thrill cam. Started zooming out.
It don't worked.
When it reached the LOD_M distance only the interior are visible.
In the the LOD_L the interiors are barrely visible.
In LOD_VL only some minor meshes are visible.
It seems to me that it have a poly limit or memory limit like dummiesboy said.

If you guys are really pissed off because of this, I'll make all my cars with all the LODs. But don't complain about the poor quality of it. I'm not a 3D modeler and I'm not interested in modeling a Body for each LOD level.

[dummiesboy]

Bumping a slightly old topic here, but here's an idea that I've been putting into practice with Revisited. Instead of naming the models *_H, just name them *_VL. MM2 does not require the H (or M, L) bodies. Doing this will save memory, and make the models visible from huge distances.

[ettieapple]

mmmh, clever thought

[CarLuver69]

Bumping a slightly old topic here, but here's an idea that I've been putting into practice with Revisited. Instead of naming the models *_H, just name them *_VL. MM2 does not require the H (or M, L) bodies. Doing this will save memory, and make the models visible from huge distances.

Well I'll be damned...