Corner clarity / middle blind spot? (Spherical projection).

[AlexTengu]

Tried to find such topic through forum, and in google - and didn't find it, so:

I suggest to change the screen drawing projection engine from "plane" to "sphere".

The main reason for that is way too unwanted fog distance difference between center and corners of the screen.
It happens because when we use the projection plane, plane's corners are located much farther from camera, than the center.
So the drawing distance and the fog distance are much inconsistent across the screen.



The projection plane is very outdated technology, especially for open world games!

In Morrowind it results in epic blind spot in the middle, thus if someone wants to throw a little glance over lake, or if he wants to estimate the dangers en route - he needs to aim the point of interest possibly closer to screen corners. Ridiculous.

Among other possible visual improvements, the "corner clarity/middle blind spot" in MW is the ugly duck and the bottleneck of gameplay immersion.

In addition to request of adding Panini fov projection, these two improvements could become large milestone in graphical improvement.

sorry if my englang is very bed.

[AnyOldName3]

There's an open merge request trying to sort it out. Surprisingly, it's not something that's especially easy to work around - we've not found a single example of another game that has a far sphere instead of a far plane. If you happen to know of any, and potentially have a link to something describing how they did it, it might help us see what's fast and what isn't.

At least we've now got proof that there's a user asking for this feature that didn't first see the merge request.

[AlexTengu]

Just checked Draw distance article at wiki, and found there:

A common trick used in games to disguise a short draw distance is to obscure the area with a distance fog.

I can not insist now, that gamedev uses projection surfaces differ from plane.

Maybe, the solution is spherical fog gradient instead of flat gradient.
Without sufficient knowledges about vanilla/openmw engine, or about technical deeps of game engines at all, I can not propose the right solution, because the devil is in the detail, and only experienced developer knows is it possible to modify the fog spread in mw/opwnmw engine.

We've now got proof that there's a user asking for this feature that didn't first see the merge request.

I suppose, that user is not exactly the programmer. By the way, that user just looked through 25 pull requests and did not figured out if there is required PR. Also, the user is not developed enough to look through ~2500 merges. Also, the suspect can not find the obvious way to learn the proper posting procedure, even fixed topics don't highlight the solution. I guess, he feels sorry.

[Capostrophic]

There are two repositories, check, like, the other one. The one we're supposed to be switching to in full.

[AnyOldName3]

We tried radial fog, but it didn't look very good. The fog doesn't blend into the skybox very well (as Morrowind uses a fixed colour for fog, but a gradient for the skybox), so you can still see objects being clipped near the middle of the FOV, even if the ones at the edges look washed out.

[AlexTengu]

We tried radial fog

User appreciate this.

User tried to draw attention to this issue, because he thinks it is important for high-quality gameplay.
User glad to see that problem is meaning, and being developed.

Morrowind uses a fixed colour for fog, but a gradient for the skybox

Yup, specific knowledge. I guess, you even worked through kind of "radial fog" + "vertical axes of diminishing gradient" or something like this.

I am just gamer, with some degree. Me can not add something valuable and constructive here due to lack of practice in code and in openmw in particular. Maybe other users could.

Thank you.

[Stomy]

Our current merge request for this issue has radial fog calculation and a depth-prepass with a big inverted sphere to smooth out the far draw distance, it's pretty effective and should be merged into master soon. Once it's in, the next release will have a checkbox in the launcher to turn it on. There's video demonstrating it on the OpenMW discord:

Old/Current (Planar) Behavior: https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/ ... tRange.mp4
New Radial Clipping + Fog: https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/ ... tRange.mp4

We've found a slight problem with how it changes the glare effect for looking at the sun but we're working on that as a separate issue, and most people likely won't notice the difference anyway.

[AlexTengu]

New Radial Clipping + Fog: video

Looks good!

By the way, found "other one" repository.
https://gitlab.com/OpenMW/openmw/merge_requests/101

Migrating github > gitlub, ok, convenient.