Longer View Distances for Trees, Peds, and Vehicles

[GoSP] Jon

[GoSP] Jon

Screw you all
20171022171854_1.jpg
I'm currently working on a mod that makes things visible from farther distances so the world doesn't look quite as barren in the background. It's a delicate balancing act with getting the numbers just right because the game will just plainly stop rendering certain things if they're being seen too far. For example, trees will only be visible at certain camera angles if the distance is pushed too far. I'm still investigating that.
Here are some screenshots:

1. Distant peds and vehicles visible much farther away:
viewdist_01.jpg

2: Foliage visible farther - notice how trees on the other side of that channel can still be seen.
20171022171303_1.jpg


Once some of the bugs are ironed out (if it's possible to) I'll release the mod. It involves tweaks on a lot of tables, however, so there are some incompatibilities with other mods I'm also trying to minimize. For instance, it has a hard conflict with that fancy new weather mod that came out that would take a lot of time doing manual entry or using WinMerge to fix.
 
FusionH2o said:
I know the file called "sr2_meshlibrary_fade_dists.cts" works for increasing distances of meshes.
Click to expand...
Has that really been a thing this whole time? I guess I'll look in to that. It would be great if there's a way to increase the draw distance on basically everything. It's super short by default.
 
In order to increase tree draw distance is to increase the Tree Fade limit size in the time_of_day.xtbl file. By default the Tree Fade distance is at 200. Like in my latest Realistic Time of Day/Weather Mod, I have the tree fade set to 400 in the Element section of the file:
Code: 
<Element>
        <Name>Tree_Fade</Name>
        <Type>Float</Type>
        <Display_Name>Default Tree Fade Distance</Display_Name>
        <Description>The fade distance for SpeedTree objects that do not have an explicit fade distance set.</Description>
        <Default>400.0</Default>
        </Element>

In the regular setting in the file it reads:
Code: 
<Time_Segment>
        <Name>Afternoon</Name>
        <Time>1700</Time>
        <Tree_Fade>400</Tree_Fade>
 
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FusionH2o said:
In order to increase tree draw distance is to increase the Tree Fade limit size in the time_of_day.xtbl file. By default the Tree Fade distance is at 200. Like in my latest Realistic Time of Day/Weather Mod, I have the tree fade set to 400 in the Element section of the file:
Code: 
<Element>
        <Name>Tree_Fade</Name>
        <Type>Float</Type>
        <Display_Name>Default Tree Fade Distance</Display_Name>
        <Description>The fade distance for SpeedTree objects that do not have an explicit fade distance set.</Description>
        <Default>400.0</Default>
        </Element>

In the regular setting in the file it reads:
Code: 
<Time_Segment>
        <Name>Afternoon</Name>
        <Time>1700</Time>
        <Tree_Fade>400</Tree_Fade>
Click to expand...
This is one of the changes I made already. The trick is just making sure the trees don't all vanish randomly at longer distances.

EDIT: More progress has been made on this. It appears to be a video memory thing - freeing up more video memory for the exe to use appears to seriously reduce how often the trees just go up and vanish. I probably have to pull the render distance for them farther back until they stop disappearing, which sadly might just end up being the vanilla value. It should still stay pretty far in the GOG version though, where this memory tweak is possible.
 
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This is great to see. IMO SR2 was really beginning to show its age with the way things would just pop in and out of existence 20 feet from you.
 
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