Why Paradox ? Each Update a mess! LOD for building with floating Shader broken

[micci-1000]

Hi there,

i don´t know why you are messing up the workshop / work of modders with each update. A game that is so popular because it has a huge modding community .. a slap in my/their face.

With the last green Cities Update you changed the Floating Shader for Buildings .. and now all my Ships Lod´s are aligned with the ground - what means .. zoom out and you will find all boats sunken ... even when the game generates the LOD its sunken (aligned with the ground). And also you are getting two seperates LOD now .. so when i have the right zoom - i have 3 models in diffrent stages to sinking.

When i try to use the Props floating shader - my model disapears direct in the Editor.

And still the problem when updating Assets in the Workshop the broke totaly and you have to make a new Workshop item ..

 

[micci-1000]

Still a big problem for modders - also because greencities boats have not that problem ..

Can a developer be so nice and pass some informations about the floating shader and lod behaviors ??

 

[AmiPolizeiFunk]

Hello Paradox/Colossal Order,

thanks for your awesome game and for allowing us modders to tweak it with so little restriction! I too am having big problems with this issue and it is ruining my concept for my PDXCON contest submission. I'm trying to do lots of boats and no matter what we try, they wind up sinking to the ocean floor (so you can't see them), when you zoom all the way out. It seems to be a bug with the "floating shader" and the LOD levels. I've been trying everything I can think of to get my submission entry to work w/o bugging out. I've used the "WaterCleanerAI" from the "Floating Garbage Collector" as a template, and this helped a little bit -- I was able to get a couple of hundred floating boats to not sink... but I need just a few more! After a hundred or so of these modded Floating Garbage Collectors, the bug comes back and ruins my logo project. Here are some screenshots:

^^^^This is how many I can do before they bug out. screenshot shows how they look at normal zoom level

^^^ this is how they look zoomed out. The docks (no watercleanerAI template) have the bug, but the boats are still working

Then if I add 3 or 4 more boats to start working on the "8", many of the previous boats start to bug out. Here's how they look when fully zoomed. You can see that most of the "2", all of the "0", and half of the "1" have vanished to the ocean floor.

Here is a thread on SimTropolis where we are also wrestling with this bug: https://community.simtropolis.com/forums/topic/74303-problem-lod-after-green-cities-update/

Any tips? I have 2 weeks to try to sort this out before my contest submission is due. Thanks in advance.

 

[AmiPolizeiFunk]

Thx LetterZ for posting in the submission thread to let us know that you are aware of the issue. Just an update -- I've found a work-around! I've also found that this issue occurs with vanilla assets as well as modded assets. If you have hundreds of anything floating (wind turbines, buoys, floating gardens, whatever), chunks of them will start to vanish when you zoom out. Originally I thought that "MoveIt" might be making matters worse, as sometimes moving non-buggy assets will make them bug out, but I just discovered that MoveIt can actually solve my problem! I've found that with careful usage of MoveIt, I can make the assets stop sinking. It must reset some kind of variable to something that fixes the buggy aspect of the assets -- I have no idea. But I'm very happy that my hundreds of "Floating Garbage Collectors" will work for the contest submission. Sadly, this fix is not possible for our modded ships and piers that use the floating shader, as they vanish 100% of the time when you zoom out. It only works for assets created with the template.

Hope this info helps.