Feedback: Viewdistance and sense of scale.
This post consists of feedback and a related suggestion.
Feedback:
The actual viewdistance is enough. At max viewdistance you can even see the shore of the western deadlands from kion's beach.
Unfortunatly it gives me very little of a sense of scale.
I know there is more beyond my view distance but nothing hints at it.
My viewdistance is also rather absolute, objects at the end of my viewdistance fog over very briefly and are then unloaded.
This takes away from my sense of immersion, suspension of disbelief is broken.
In part this is due to the horizon, it is positioned unnaturaly high and you have to angle your view up quite a bit to view the magnificent sky over your head.
This also due to how short the fog area is, fogged over mountains give a sense of them being far away. terrain unloads to fast .
It would add to the sense of immersion if the horizon was lowered a bit and if some large landmarks, buildings and trees were marked as render allways.
It would be no more then logical to be able to see Winters peak on the horizon from valkor's castle.
I made a mod as proof of concept.
Get the mod here: http://community.istaria.com/Web/Sho...?PostID=120975
Note that the mod is just a proof of concept and is still full of ugly bugs, like the sky looking ugly when you move from blight to normal area for example.
you will also have to change the viewdistance from 500 to 600 to simulate the fog distance effect.
for me this mod proves that a lower horizon and a longer fog area (note, not actually less viewdistance) are more immersive.
Unfortunatly this mod does not show that having landmarks stay rendered, no matter the distance, increases the sense of scale.
I couldn't find a way to do that.
I could simulate it by playing with distance settings though, eats up resources I'm afraid.
This is what it looks like when you look south from the beach at south march with the mod:
http://www.ancientorder.org/Pics/fogexample3.jpg
And this is what it would look like if Shepherds isle (big one south of south march) was set to allways render a low res model, no matter the distance:
http://www.ancientorder.org/Pics/fogexample4.jpg
This picture shows a basic diagram of the skydome in HZ, the diagram is not complete but complete enough to convey what I want to say.
(note that this diagram shows what you see, not what is actually there)
The black half circle represents the outer dome on wich the stars are projected, the yellow one represents the orbit of the sun and the moon, the grey one represents the dome on wich the clouds are projected and the white one represents the fog dome.
The partial blue bit of the fog dome is to represent where the actual 3d model of the fogdome ends.
The blue circle in the middle represents the inside of all this where we as players are.
The black line is the land and that black smudge on top of the line is supossed to be a lil man.
The thin horizontal line radiating out from the little man represents the view distance.
The black box represents where the fog starts (on the man side of the box) and where the terrain is unloaded (other side of the box)
The picture has been devided in two, the left side represents the normal situation and the right side represents the situation with my mod.
On the left side (original situation) fog is shown up to point A (no matter the weather conditions, in bad weather a thicker fog texture is used) and the horizon is shown at point B.
Unfortunatly my mind expects the horizon to be at point C.
Terrain is unloaded at point D.
The distance between fog start and terrain unload spot is small.
On the right side (modded situation) fog is shown up to point 2 in normal conditions and up to point 1 in stormy, blighty conditions.
The horizon is where my mind expects it, at point 3.
Terrain is unloaded at point 4
To top it of the distance between fog start and terrain unload is twice as long, adding to my sense of scale.
Point 5 is where idealy objects that where flagged as render allways would be, unfortunatly not the case in the mod.
The pictures over here show what this looks like in practice:
http://community.istaria.com/Web/Sho...?PostID=120975
These two pictures are pretty shots of how nice the horizon could look if Tulga makes the changes I am about to suggest.
http://www.ancientorder.org/Pics/fogexample1.jpg
http://www.ancientorder.org/Pics/fogexample2.jpg
Suggestion:
move the horizon down:
To move the horizon down we must first take a look at the fog dome.
The fog dome is single model for wich the textures have been laid out rather haphazerdly.
A "bowl" bit wich colores the fogdome up to point B in the diagram and a "fog" bit wich colors the area above that.
To move the horizon down in my mod I had to work around not being able to influence the 3d models. My mod is therefore very large and overly complex.
For Tulga this is much easier.
I suggest tulga moves the model of the fog dome (skydome_fog_soft.agf and possibly skydome_fog_hard.agf too) down a few points.
So that point B is at the hight where point C is now.
more precisely:
The skinmesh of the skydome_fog_soft.agf is layed out like this:
move the model downwards until the polygon edges marked red in this little drawing are just a little higher then the lowest polygons of skydome_inner_cloudsthick.agf (the grey half circle in the diagram)
Increase the fog area
The fog area is really short right now, things fog over and are out of viewdistance before they have truly fogged over.
A far longer fog area gives you the feeling that objects that are really not that far off are a great distance away.
The mod proves this (well, to me at least)
Right now distance fog is controlled by the region you are in.
for a normal region the fog is set to start at point 50 and stop at point 3000
For a blight region that is set to start at 1 and end at 50.
These values control how far the fog is "stretched", the further its stretched the thinner it is.
When you set your view distance you set the fogenddistance, you set it just for yourself and not for the region however.
It controls unto where your view goes and does not affect the stretching, the actual fog start and end distance.
- change fog values for all regions so that the fog isn't stretched so thin anymore, 50-450 for a normal region for example.
- change the viewdistances.
Right now when you set the viewdistance to 50% the terrain fogs over at 49% and vanishes at 50%.
Change it so that when you set viewdistance to 50% then terrain fogs over at 50% and vanishes at 60%.
(values pulled out of my tailhole)
- Change what the view distance slider influences.
Let the slider influence what the player sees in a region. Right now players just change their unload distances and some other settings.
The stretching of the fog caused by the values in the region def files, is not influenced. That in itself is good but the beginning and end of the stretching is also not influenced.
The slider should change the region fog settings in correct proportion.
If the slider is set to 50 meters, and fog is set to 50 meters start and 450 end then fog stretching is 400.
If the player sets the slider to 40 then fog start (in the regions def) should become 40 and end should become 440, stretching staying at 400.
Set landmarks to render allways
Objects fog into the distance and then dissapear.
*poof*
gone.
This greatly takes away from he immersion and sense of scale.
I suggest Tulga sets certain objects and parts of the landscape to render allways, so that they are not removed by distance culling at all or are removed at about 10 times the distance normal objects get unloaded.
These objects and landscape bits would then be rendered as outlines only when at distance, fog colored.
If this is done beyond the point normal objects and terrain are unloaded we will be able to see mountains and towers over the horizons, giving us more sense of scale as these objects truly are far away
Performance is not greatly affected as the amount of polygons that must be rendered extra is minimal.
you will then be able to see the tower of sorcery on the horizon when in mahagra, see the mountains east of harro on the horizon when you are at mithril anvil, etc.
I imagine there are a couple of scenario's but I would hope it goes something like this:
It is actually possible for tulga to set induvidual polygons of the landscape to render allways.
if it is then also possible for tulga to create a second lod switch distance for terrain it will be relativly easy (but time consuming)
-Flag a lot of mountains as render allways.
-Flag a lot of towers and other objects as render allways.
-Create a new LoD model for these objects, one with an extremely few polygons.
-Create a second lod switch distance for the terrain, set it to switch inside the fogged over area. Set the lod resolution beyond this point extremely low, like 10 or something.
And if that isn't possible maybe it is possble to create a really low poly version of the landscape, flag it as render allways, assign its texture to the lower left corner of Sky_horizons_soft.agh to give it fog color.
Create it as a skydome object that has occludable set to false and occluder set to true and align its hight exactly with that of the landscape.
Next set it it start loading "terrain" at the spot the real terrain is unloaded and let it unload terrain at 10.000 meters or something :P
Unfortunatly that extra terrain model will giver performance a kick though.
Tulga's system is quite flexibel, it should be relativly easy to figure out a way to keep rendering only certain objects and mountains at distance without making a notable performance hit.
So why then, does my mod to show how immersive the lower horizon and different fog is need to have max texture resolution?
Because I had to precisely color in one single item that existed on a small area of a 64x64 texture.
I had to increase the texture to 2048x2048 to get enough detail to color this section precisely and textures that size only show correctly in the highest texture detail settings.
And that concludes my suggestion for a more immersive horizon and a greater sense of scale.
*phew*
)
Originally Posted by Cobal
