St. Martial - Dead Man's Tree (spoilers)

[Ravenwulfe]

This one is going to be a bit hard to explain, something I tried reporting a lot back in the day to.

 

The issue - Now if you collect the exploration badge up in the upper northwest of St. Martial called Dead Man's Tree and read the description, you will get a text box talking about possibly seeing a ghost near the tree. However, if you have your view distance up high, the effect they did might not ever be visible for you.

 

If your draw distance is low, and you are a certain distance away where LOD kicks in, you will actually see a skeleton hanging from the branch of the tree. As you get closer, the skeleton will eventually get culled out and "disappear" as it were. However the further your draw distance is set to the sooner this skeleton gets culled out and those with max settings may not even know this effect even exists since the LOD is set much further away.

 

Not sure how to fix this one but maybe a special exception or even have the skeleton be time based instead of tied to the view distance set by the player.

[Arc-Mage]

This has been reported before with pics. I remember during the early days of Villains you could see it with no problems. Not sure what changed but others have pointed it out too.

[Ravenwulfe]

2 hours ago, Arc-Mage said:

This has been reported before with pics. I remember during the early days of Villains you could see it with no problems. Not sure what changed but others have pointed it out too.

As stated the trick to the skeleton is that it is using the Level of Detail (LOD) and what is done is that the low poly model is made visible while the high poly is culled out (made invisible basically). So what causes this is the view distance you have set. The further your view distance is set to the further it takes for the LOD to be rendered in and thus the skeleton disappears much further out. It is intentionally set to where it is suppose to be culled out but this particular issue boils down to people with high view distances losing sight of it sooner or even not being able to see it at all due to view distance being set so high.

 

It's to mesh with the exploration badges lore, essentially, of people seeing the skeleton there sometimes but due to high powered graphics cards many might not see this at all. So back in the day when pushing higher view distances was bad for graphics cards, this skeleton was more visible to those, but these days with more powerful machines and people pushing their graphics through the roof, this effect that was created is less likely to be seen.

 

As I said, I don't have a solution for this, in general, since it uses the LOD to create this effect.

[Arc-Mage]

So is the hanging skeleton supposed to disappear as you get closer to it? Like a ghost or mirage?

[TheZag]

56 minutes ago, Arc-Mage said:

So is the hanging skeleton supposed to disappear as you get closer to it? Like a ghost or mirage?

 

Ya,  its supposed to disappear.

 

[Blood Speaker]

Yeah, not a bug, as far as I was ever able to determine. It's supposed to be an "edge of your vision" sort of phantom that you see from a distance, but is gone when you're close.