Ben Supnik Wrote:- Ideally, in my fantasy world with the unicorns and flying elephants, some kind of metric to indicate the physical error of each of the higher LODs...in other words, how much different is a 16-stud from a perfect circle, or a 48-stud. For the non-lossy cases, a program could then decide on the fly when the zoom factor makes such an LOD irrelevant.
I think this is pretty much the most important parameter. If the paths described in the config ldr use e.g. a percentage number that indicates howmuch 'detail' is been cut away from files at that location. Any renderder could then do simple (and low cost) frustum space z distance calculations resulting in a raw number of part pixels per screen pixel (let's say 10 for now, meaning one ldu is 10 pixels at 100% detail). And use that number to find the closest match low/high detail variant of the part.
For example you have an part that's 20LDU (we have to decide what dimension this is, highest, lowest or average)
And it would be rendered at 50pixels, you could e.g. calculate that it's using (20*10)/50 -> 25% of it's 'resolution', now if there are LOD sources of e.g. 75%, 50% and 25% it would look in the 25 one for a replacement, if none it would try the 50 and so on.
Just a rough idea / my 2cts
edit: changed some of the numbers to make more sense.