Is it ever! I've just about got used to the idea that the drop-out at stations is as good as it's going to get, and to be fair it's pretty convincing when there's no network traffic. Only the delay of instance construction really mars it. But dropping into USS, tourist beacons, capital ships etc. is horrible.
That's interesting. Since the beta dropped I've reset my settings and maxed that slider, and while planetary surface LOD loading seems smoother, USS and beacons are as bad as they ever were. The planets could be due to efficiency improvements in the actual code, so it's interesting you suggest a GPU bottleneck for the other stuff. My card only has 3GB of VRAM which is pretty paltry by modern standards. I wonder if that's part of the problem. Been looking for a reason to upgrade. Something to save the pennies towards, maybe.
That combination of interpretations is basically how I see it, too. I love the shock arrival. Like you're leaving somewhere else and smashing back into normal space.
I didn't like the distant "star" when it was first added. Even though it gives a nice clue as to the class of destination star if you forgot to read the Info panel, it made witchspace feel less otherworldly. But once I started thinking of it as light leaking from the surface of the star, rather than the entire star itself, it works very nicely. It even goes some way towards "explaining" why the light is always dead centre of the tunnel even though the ship emerges offset from the centre of the star.
Unfortunately there is still the problem at the other end, with the galaxy's stars fading out behind the witchspace tunnel. That doesn't work for me at all, for the same reason, but as FD are in charge of the aesthetics there's not really much I can do except headcanon it. Residual photons caught in the event horizon of the blah-de-blah...
