What does Planet Tech V4 do to help with things like popping trees as distance changes — the load-in, the LOD swaps?
TL;DRV4 doesn't fundamentally change tree popping or loading, but objects spawn on more stable data, so assets should fade more smoothly than before while the underlying loading process stays the same.
I mean, Planet Tech V4 doesn't really change anything about that, to be perfectly honest. That being said, there are some improvements in terms of what data the objects are spawned on. That's more stable and doesn't jump around as much as it LODs out. That's one improvement. But it's also not necessarily connected to the LODs. And then there's also the fact that we continuously work on the assets and try to improve them as best as we can. But it's also disconnected from Planet Tech V4, really. It's just the thing we try to improve our pipelines all the time. So it should be better than before, but it's not necessarily completely different.
From a layman's perspective, it certainly looks smoother to me. And I don't know if that's just me imagining it, but I see more fades than just pops.
Yeah. I mean, that's part of the whole data being more stable thing, really. Before, a lot of the moving of assets was not so much that the LODs were badly made, but just that the data they are spawned on moved around with the mips. When you zoom out, the quality of data changes. And this is something that thankfully the engineers were able to improve a lot. So it should be much better than before in this regard. But the underlying loading process is still the same.