Well... It's true, I do. With the prim limitations on physical objects in SL the only way I can get the look I want and preserve the smooth and responsive performance of a physical vehicle is by relying heavily upon sculpties.
Happily - for me at least, my computer is on the beefy side with a sparkly new nVidia 9800 1 GB graphics card and 4 GB of RAM, so I can safely max out my video settings and - as long as I keep an extra fan blowing on the video card - things look great.
At least up close.
Welcome to the wonderful world of Level of Detail or LOD as it's more commonly called. This is what causes nice sharp edged sculptys to turn into a non-descript blobs as you move away from them. As I understand it the thought process was that by dropping the amount of detail on the sculpty at a greater distance it would reduce the amount of resources used to render it. All well and good in 2007 when there were six sculpties in all of SL, but we hates it in 2009.
Happily there is something we can do about it. Like so many other things in the SL Viewer, there is an obscure and arcane setting to change the way LOD works. It's called RenderVolumeLODFactor - no idea why so don't ask. The default setting for my system with all that RAM and sparkly video card is 1.125 - 1.125 what I can't tell you so don't ask. I've taken to keeping it at 16 - I've been told that 4 is the maximum setting, but the system accepts 16, and it seems to increase the range of the LOD blobification so that's what I use.
A quick disclaimer at the insistance of the boys down at Engulff & Devour, Esq. To the best of my knowledge changing these settings can't harm your computer, interfere with SL or cause your hair to fall out, but I'm not an expert at any of these things, so - should you choose to make the changes outlined below, you do so at your own risk.
Oh that sounds scary doesn't it?
Luckily making the LOD change takes less time to do than it takes to read how to do it - especially when I'm the one doing the writing.
We'll need to change a debug setting which is done via the Advanced menu in the SL viewer. If you don't see an Advanced menu you can activate it by pressing Control Alt and D. Once it's visible, click on Advanced and locate and click on Debug Settings.
The Debug Settings window should appear. It's drab and lacking in any sort of informative... Errr... Information. If you click on the arrow to see all the settings... Well you might feel a little overwhelmed
Luckily I know where we're going. In the white text field near the top of the window start typing RenderVolumeLODFactor. The Viewer will start filling it in as you type. In the lower portion of the Debug Settings window you should see the current setting. Make a note of that value just in case we need to go back to it.
Now it's time to change the setting. As I mentioned I've got mine set at 16 and haven't noticed any negative side effects. To be safe you might start at 4 and see how your system responds.
Oh, there's no Save or OK button in the Debug Settings window. As soon as you type something it's changed (wierd I know), so go ahead and close that window and see how your sculpties look now. Ideally you should be able to see them without blobification at two to three times the distance now. At 16 I can generally still see the details on my sculpties at the distance when the object itself starts to get too small to see.
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