Fog-o-View

[InuTracy]

This game really needs adjustable fog of view. It will decrease lag DRASTICLY. For thoes who don\'t know what fog of view is, it\'s when your looking at a certain distance white fog appears and makes it so it doesn\'t draw the rest of the map out of your sight. Most huge games do this to cut lag in half and it still works and Planeshift would be definatly categorized as a huge game seeing as you can look out across the plaza and see miles and miles away into the cavern. This would also cut load time down because it wouldn\'t have to draw so much world stuff. This should be adjustable as well so better computers can make it so it appears farther away and worse computers can make it appear closer.

[Zeraph]

Yep it\'s called LOD: \"Level of Detail\" & related stuff how I understand it\'s implemented in CB... I\'d like fog to end the geometry though I hope that\'s how it looks, otherwise the geometry just ends in Sharp corners like it\'s cut off...

[ArcaneFalcon]

Fog of view is is simply the fog effect to make the clip plane less dramatic.  Personally, I like to have fog off and have my clip plane visible as it gives me better visibility, though that is simply my preference.  And yes, I agree, the clip plane should be adjustable (on the fly even, hotkeys are good).

Level of detail is the amount of detail put into objects.  This can be adjusted depending on the game.  In recent games (UT2k4 for example) you can set the level of detail for different objects (walls, floors, players, etc.).  In other games it simply does it based on distance.  Depending on how far away something is, less detail will be put into drawing it, which actually won\'t change much since it is so far away.  This is how PS probably will work.

[Ralleyon]

I know this thread is ooooooooooooooooooooooold, but still I think it deserves a chance and here's why. (Plus this discussion was quite a while back when most of the things weren't planned or working yet)

Thing is, I've been doing some testing with the cvs version of PS and tried the /fog command which I found that it improves the fps drastically in some areas. So I said to myself, maybe this level of detail isn't such a bad idea after all.

Basically there is such a setting in game as well, setting adaptive camera, but those who have really bad drivers or not-so-good computers and set that camera too low, can actually see the missing textures and such which is not a pretty sight not to mention quite useless. So why not hide it?

Thus, I don't know if a Level of Detail in its true sense will be implemented, but the existing one combined with the already in-game fog effect will increase fps for some people and hide the missing textures  not rendered anyway due to the low adaptive camera settings - resulting in a very good improvement for the game.

So, what do you say? Will you excuse the revive and look into this idea? Basically I think it's not very hard to put them together since all the required elements are already in the game, it just needs a bit of tweaking so that someone can actually set a permament fog (drawing distance depending on his setting) from the options menu.