I'm posting this thread in response to feedback I got on a previous thread. I was told that most lagg in BeamNG is caused by plants and trees in the maps, and that it is very graphics intensive. What if the number of polygons per brush could be controlled with a slider in the settings, all the way to the left being single poly forward facing billboard trees, like in rigs of rods, and all the way to the right being lots of pollys per brush so that they look good on high end computers, with lots of increments in between. This way, changing the mesh quality in the settings doesn't just mean changing the draw distance of the mesh, the mesh can be more simplified instead (so lower end computers would have the mesh quality set to "high," and pollys per mesh set to "low." The mesh would be simpler so that the draw distance could be much farther. It would look better and lagg less.) Am I on to something, or is it a bad idea?
Yes, this could be a thing but it would be difficult to implement unless you either have 1 polygon or all polygons. Right now you can change the vegetation density in graphics settings.
What you're describing is exactly what Mesh Quality does. Lowering the quality from High doesn't just reduce the draw distance, it also scales the LevelOfDetail (LoD) such that it will use the simpler LoDs overall - although it will prefer use higher detail LoDs closer to you, lowering it reduces the poly count of every forest item, no matter the distance. Set it to lowest and it'll make all vegetation into billboards (the 2D single-face polygon) just as you're describing.
