Spring RTS Engine

Instead of showing the pathetic gray shapes, please... let's just quit drawing anything that's farther than the max distance specified in Settings.

It's a massive waste of processing power to show these ugly gray shapes. Units should just show their Icons, and Features could either show a generic icon, or nothing at all. The intermediate step just looks awful, and with Features in the mix, it's obviously awful, whereas before it was just Units, so we couldn't see how bad it looks, having the world filled with little gray billboards.

For Features, I'd like to suggest a "nohide" tag, that will never hide that object, at any distance. That will take care of giant Features that we never want to disappear...

I wrote a patch that made features always show regardless of distance years ago, its probably been rewritten but tis definately there. Look at aGorms tree map.

Yeah, I know, but that's not really what I'm talking about, tbh. IIRC, I can force a Feature to draw all of the time with Lua, but meh, the main issue is that the billboards suck, and have always sucked, and should just get removed, now that we have icons, etc..

What I'm asking for is just a cleanup of the current "LOD" system, which is pretty bad. Heck, it's not even necessary to do very much- just remove the code that draws the quads and makes the textures, and make the distance at which IconDistance and the distance for Trees and Units always be locked, so that raising IconDistance always lowers the distance at which those things are rendered... no more "hey, it flashes gray for a moment before becoming an icon" stuff ever again, and no more having to explain to newbs why they see a bunch of gray rectangles, etc.- stuff would just disappear. It'd be more professional if they faded out over a second or so, imo, but I'd settle for blatant pop-in over pop-in-mixed-with-weird-quads any day...