Disabling Level of Detail Reduction in FF1

[BentonGrey]

Howdy folks, this is from a post by Iazu on the GOG FF forums:

found out how to disable the (imo pretty aggressive) lod adjusting in this game. For those who don't know what that is, look at the character models in-game when you start zooming out. They'll start visibly losing detail as soon as you start moving the camera out and "pop" that detail back in as you zoom back in. This tweak disables that and renders the characters at full detail regardless of your zoom level.

All you need to do is go into the game's install folder and browse to the "system" folder. Then open the file "init.py" in notepad or any other text editor. Once it's open add this line at the end...

ff.RENDER_LOD_MAXSIZE = 0

then save the file.

That should do it. Now when you relaunch the game the LOD should be disabled.

[Ewzzy]

I just figured out how to do that myself the other day. I almost posted it but I figured everyone else already knew.

You can really improve the visuals by doing that and forcing 2X SuperSampling and 16x anisotropic filtering in the Nvidia Control Panel or AMD Radeon Settings.

Just be careful not to set your lods to "1" or you get this:

[BentonGrey]

Haha, yeah, all of a sudden it's Freedom Force: Picaso Edition!

[Ewzzy]

Funnily enough I was just looking at some developer diaries posted on IGN and programmer Rowan Wyborn talks about the LOD system.

A technique to avoid these problems that has gained popularity is to render characters using a dynamic level of detail (LOD) system where distant characters are drawn using a reduced set of polygons in the full character model. This results in a good reduction in per-character polygons drawn while keeping the visual quality of nearby characters high. NetImmerse has a great continuous level of detail system, which we use on all our characters. That means that Freedom Force heroes look cool close up, and it lets us have a lot of characters in the scene running around on the streets below

That continuous LOD system is, as noted, extremely aggressive compared to the one-step pre-determined LODs that debuted in Spyro the Dragon and Mario 64 a few years earlier. Can't blame them too much though, my PC at the time was way under spec'd to run the game so any bit helped.

[Ewzzy]

I was already working on a comparison so here it is. There's a lot you can do by forcing Anti-Aliasing and Anisotropic Filtering. These are pretty close crops but you can see the difference fullscreen.

[Epimethee]

Nice improvement! This could be combined with upscaled textures to modernize a bit the look of the game.

[BentonGrey]

Indeed!