Distant terrain
Posted: 15 Mar 2017, 15:14
http://i.imgur.com/budmNsK.jpg
What's this? I can see the Ghostfence all the way from Ald-Ruhn and my fps is above 10. This is OpenMW and not MGE XE, right?
This is OpenMW alright and what you're seeing is made possible by the newest addition from scrawl - distant terrain. This new feature is available in the latest OpenMW commit and if you're on windows, you can download it from Ace's nightly builds to try it out yourself.
So what does it do? In short, it simplifies the land mesh, nothing else. It doesn't touch on scripts, NPCs and statics, but having simplified land certainly lightens the workload to a point where we can have some wiggle room with our view distance.
You may have noticed that I've taken use of this in some of the screenshots and loaded enough statics to create the illusion that there are objects as far as the eye can see. You can only see empty land if I purposefully look at something very distant.
I must admit, I cheated a little to boost my fps. There is an additional feature called small object culling, which makes it so that objects too tiny are not rendered and my computer's performance is spared. I used this rather aggressively, as I am working with a few years old laptop, but someone with a dedicated gaming rig might get better results while culling less.
Finally, I would like to share my last screenshot, as well as how you can set this up. After downloading and installing the latest commit, find settings.cfg and add the following lines:
[Camera]
viewing distance = 6666.0 #Determines how much land is rendered. Add another 6 or 66 to it.
small feature culling pixel size = 2.0 #The default is 2, but you may want to change it to 16 at the highest. Improves performance.
[Cells]
exterior cell load distance = 1 #This loads statics, NPCs and scripts around you. You may want to set this to 2, 3 or 4.
[Terrain]
distant terrain = True #The on-switch to distant terrain. Set this to True.
What's this? I can see the Ghostfence all the way from Ald-Ruhn and my fps is above 10. This is OpenMW and not MGE XE, right?
This is OpenMW alright and what you're seeing is made possible by the newest addition from scrawl - distant terrain. This new feature is available in the latest OpenMW commit and if you're on windows, you can download it from Ace's nightly builds to try it out yourself.
So what does it do? In short, it simplifies the land mesh, nothing else. It doesn't touch on scripts, NPCs and statics, but having simplified land certainly lightens the workload to a point where we can have some wiggle room with our view distance.
You may have noticed that I've taken use of this in some of the screenshots and loaded enough statics to create the illusion that there are objects as far as the eye can see. You can only see empty land if I purposefully look at something very distant.
I must admit, I cheated a little to boost my fps. There is an additional feature called small object culling, which makes it so that objects too tiny are not rendered and my computer's performance is spared. I used this rather aggressively, as I am working with a few years old laptop, but someone with a dedicated gaming rig might get better results while culling less.
Finally, I would like to share my last screenshot, as well as how you can set this up. After downloading and installing the latest commit, find settings.cfg and add the following lines:
[Camera]
viewing distance = 6666.0 #Determines how much land is rendered. Add another 6 or 66 to it.
small feature culling pixel size = 2.0 #The default is 2, but you may want to change it to 16 at the highest. Improves performance.
[Cells]
exterior cell load distance = 1 #This loads statics, NPCs and scripts around you. You may want to set this to 2, 3 or 4.
[Terrain]
distant terrain = True #The on-switch to distant terrain. Set this to True.