Hi Will,

> I know you've frozen development now but some kind of option to set the
> display resolution

This is actually currently available under Options / View / Meshing parameters. You can adjust the angle there, putting it down to an angle of 5 actually will solve this particular example. However, I don't really recommend doing that for normal operation because it will cause rather excessively dense meshes for many other objects, which will tend to bog things down on more complex models.

Right now the display meshing is driven totally off of angular measurements, and that doesn't work very well for stuff that's a bit larger on the screen but only has very shallowly curved stuff. To fix this really means making the display mesher look at more than just the angle, like possibly the distance gap between the mesh and the surface. But the big advantage to only angular measurements is that they are scale independent, that is they don't work differently on a large sized object versus a small sized object, they purely work off of the curvature of the surface. Distance measurements tend to have issues from differences in the overall scale of objects.

This is a very sensitive area for performance, it would be easy for me to make things denser to make this look smooth, but the trick is not to make everything too dense by default and bog other things down unnecessarily.

I've collected several examples of this kind of shallow mesh problem, and at some point I'll try to fix it up, but it's not really an area where I can do a quick fix. Any changes in this area will require a lot of performance analysis to make sure that it doesn't slow things down.


> or perhaps a dynamic option that based on the number of entities (or
> perhaps screen redraw time) could up the resolution until things start to
> slow down when redrawing?

That might be possible at some point, but it's really pretty difficult to pull off well - meshing in general tends to be a pretty intensive calculation, and it can be hard to try and slip in an intensive calculation right in the middle of something like view rotation. It tends to kind of have a stuttering effect. It's kind of easier to ensure smooth view operation by just getting all the meshing out of the way at the start like it currently does.

- Michael