Planetary No Load Mode

[Commodore]

While the new planets are cool, there are often times when I just don't want to be downloading, loading and rendering them. In battles (ship), when flying through several star systems, seeing a planet core with very slowly loading chunks doesn't add anything to the experience, except a bad framerate.

My suggestion is a option in settings or even a key, which stops the client loading the planets, instead they would just see the (maybe improved) planet placeholder. The dodecahedron could be a solid object, preventing a ship/astronaut from reaching the surface while they are in this mode. (and getting stuck in blocks/core when they change modes). This should make fighting/chasing through many sectors a lot smoother.

Would you use this mode?

 

[Syzygy]

Probably could have the server doing the entire loading and have clients only load what needs to be rendered, so culling the downloading of the non-visible blocks for clients.

For now if you are loading planets and don't want to, reduce the max segments (view distance) setting and it wont load them until you are closer.

 

[RedDragonflyxx]

Or, you can increase the sector size, that reduces the number of planets and people seem to like a size of 10000 (Yes, you can make it bigger than 5000)

 

[Commodore]

Probably could have the server doing the entire loading and have clients only load what needs to be rendered, so culling the downloading of the non-visible blocks for clients.

For now if you are loading planets and don't want to, reduce the max segments (view distance) setting and it wont load them until you are closer.

I'm not exactly sure what max segments does, but I was under the impression it was a graphical thing, that would only effect what is shown, not what is loaded.

Or, you can increase the sector size, that reduces the number of planets and people seem to like a size of 10000 (Yes, you can make it bigger than 5000)

Although that would make it easier to keep a battle away from planets, I think starmade would still start loading planets at the same time, when you enter a sector adjacent to the one containing the planet.

 

[RedDragonflyxx]

I'm not exactly sure what max segments does, but I was under the impression it was a graphical thing, that would only effect what is shown, not what is loaded.



Although that would make it easier to keep a battle away from planets, I think starmade would still start loading planets at the same time, when you enter a sector adjacent to the one containing the planet.

Not sure about segments, might help if the bottleneck is the GPU. Even if planets do load when you enter the sector, they'll be so large that the game can load a planet before you leave the sector. For fast travel use overdrive modules. Also, I don't think loading is sector based, at that scale I only see planets loading when I get very close.