Improved Renderer

[Mallia]

Saw this video on MC render distance might be a good idea to consider something like this for VS while the engine is all in one place.

 

 

[Streetwind]

Ugh, that video was bad.

To spare everyone the need to watch it, what OP is actually trying to suggest is a LOD system for unloaded chunks.

Which is fair enough, and has been suggested before. The dev team is aware that such mods exist in Minecraft, but said that this isn't a priority for VS right now. Chiefly because >90% of the code is being handled by a single dev, and that dev is not a dedicated graphics programmer, and getting chunk LODs to work seamlessly with shaders (VS is running shaded graphics by default) is incredibly difficult and time-consuming without the experience of being a dedicated graphics programmer, and hiring a dedicated graphics programmer costs a lot of money.

At the same time, VS' engine is very efficient and performant already, and allows large view distances without a need for LODs. For example, I have a system here with an eleven year old midrange CPU and a seven year old lower-midrange GPU, and it runs a world with ~50 mods, increased world height beyond the default, at 1440p, high custom graphics settings, and 640 view distance with a stable 60-70 FPS. In Minecraft terms, that would be a view distance of 40, which is 25% greater that you can even use in Minecraft at maximum without adding mods to artificially increase the cap. Anyone with a halfway modern desktop GPU can likely run view distance 1024 or higher (64 in Minecraft terms), and the limiting factor will be VRAM, not FPS. And that's full fidelity render distance, not LODs with their inherent limitations (like being unable to display snow cover).

This isn't to say that LODs will never happen, but I imagine it's way down the priority list.

[Thorfinn]

On 9/21/2023 at 3:28 AM, Streetwind said:

Ugh, that video was bad.

Wow. I'll say. Should have read your post before I watched it. Or the half of it I did watch. Whoever that coder is needs someone else to do his PR. This guy is fingernails-on-a-chalkboard annoying. I don't mean tonal quality, though there is that, too. I mean the ability to express himself.

Concur on the quality of the game rendering as is. What really messes up LOD is chiseling. It's difficult enough with a large number of blocks. I don't know that it could be done such that you would see any improvement with the nearly infinite number of combinations you can get through chiseling. It's not something simple like just scaling a palette. Like you say, your video card does not have enough RAM to do it.