what if, in freeroam, there could be cars roaming around like in my summer car. is there any way to implement that? I thought that maybe when a roaming car comes near, it's jbeam could become more complex, and as it goes away, it's jbeam could simplify. any ideas?
Jbeam cannot have LODS. You cannot dynamically change a Jbeam like that. Anyhow, spawn some cars and set them to 'Random' mode? Enabling_AI_Controlled_Vehicles (Also doable from the 'Radial Menu')
The Jbeam is not visual. The Jbeam is physical. It defines everything in how the vehicle moves. Having it changing to a lower resolution version at distance means having a complete different vehicle. Jbeam LODs/Hotloading would not work like that. Every change deeply affect the vehicle handling/behaviour.
Now that i think about it, we can take the old game way of doing things, simulate ai for all moving vehicles, but only 5 or 6 cars can be on screen at the same time, and at the moment a car leaves the screen, its errased-derendered
That's a good idea, it's like draw distance, but for the vehicles, not the terrain. Maybe there could be an option to set how many cars can be on the screen.
Or it is simply reset and moved to another place. See, there are always X number of cars cruising around the player, but when they leave a certain radius, they are reset and teleported to somewhere else nearby on the edge of the radius. It would give the illusion of a map full of traffic. That would have a low impact on performance, but randomizing spawning cars would cause major hiccups. What if the game replaces 5 pigeons with 5 T-series? That would break a computer.