When the player zooms in to street level on a building it's worth the performance hit to load in more details and do so in a better looking way. When it's zoomed out to view large portions of the city (or the whole thing) then sure, you have to trade off graphical fidelity for performance and usability as the user builds out the city and wants to watch it grow. The amount at a given zoom should be based on the graphics settings, and low should allow for low detail even when zoomed in.

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db48x 2 hours ago | parent [-]

LOD (level of detail) techniques are used by practically every game ever written. It doesn’t mean that the developers can ignore the poly budget.

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lukebitts an hour ago | parent [-]

You are correct but what the article is asking for is nothing out of the ordinary, in fact mods already do what the author is asking for, just not in an automatic way

	▲	GenerocUsername an hour ago \| parent [-]
		And how are those mods on baseline performance? Are the mods appropriate for general audience mid range rigs? The tech industry has the capability of pure ray tracing. Game engines don't use it because the audience willing to shell 10k for PC to run it is exceedingly small. They have to target mid range specs to have an audience big enough to make money. The solution is mods by modders for modders.