View distance weirdness

[csbx]

Hello ! First--thank you very much for all involved in the project !

I'm noticing view distance weirdness that manifests in landscape easing in and out of the fog as I swivel my head from left to right in game. In short, I seem to get longer view distance at the edges of the frame. Is this related in any way to this mod and my settings ? I'm guessing it's just the price one pays at this point of development, but I really don't know.

thanks !

[CMAugust]

That's called planar fog and has been part of Morrowind since the beginning. Fortunately the upcoming 0.46.0 release has gives you option to use radial fog, which makes it behave as you would expect in more modern games.

[csbx]

Thanks a lot, CM. It's my first playthough--EVER--and it's good just to know that the limits aren't about something that I have done or can rectify at this point.

Q: is this in the nightly yet ? And would I be unwise to try to do this playthrough with the nightly ? I'm guessing I can't just swap to 0.46 when it drops, can I ?

[Capostrophic]

It will be available in 0.46.

[Atahualpa]

Q: is this in the nightly yet ? And would I be unwise to try to do this playthrough with the nightly ? I'm guessing I can't just swap to 0.46 when it drops, can I ?

As far as I know, that feature should already be available in the current nightlies.

In general, successive stable releases of OpenMW guarantee forward compatibility (at least if there's no major version change, e.g., from 0.x.y to 1.0.0). Nightly versions, on the other hand, might turn out to be unstable and may mess around with save-game-related stuff, so no guarantee is given in that case. However, since we're in the late release phase of 0.46.0, using the current nightly and switching to 0.46.0 later shouldn't be a problem.



Edit: As lysol pointed out in the following post, using the nightlies might have unwanted implications on savegame compatibility. I was mixing up RC builds and nightlies. Thanks to lysol for the clarification.

[lysol]

However, since we're in the late release phase of 0.46.0, using the current nightly and switching to 0.46.0 later shouldn't be a problem.

Not entierly correct I'm afraid. First off, 0.46.0 is branched already, so it isn't based on master anymore.

Nightly versions are just fine as of now and perfectly stable though, so go ahead and grab one of those if you wish to do that.

BUT! Nightly versions have some new savegame-format updates that make saves made in the nightlies incompatible with older versions of OpenMW. That means you can't roll back to 0.46.0 with your saves once you've updated to a nightly version ("0.47.0").

[csbx]

Thanks a lot. I gave 47.0 a go, but wasn't blown away by the shadow implementation--particularly what it did to my already borderline frames per. And even off, I thought I lost a few frames vs. 45.0, but this wasn't exactly a scientific comparison. I will say that, yep, 47 totally fixed the view distance weirdness.

[lysol]

Grabing a 0.46.0 release candidate might give an extra frame per second or two since release versions are built with some optimisation thingies.

Regarding shadows, yes they do demand a bit, but a trick to reduce the weight of them is to do a couple of things:

1. Install the mod "Morrowind Optimisation Project"
2. Reduce shadow distance
3. Perhaps try to disable "compute tight scene bounds" if that setting is on for you...