Distant Horizons Minecraft mod for Vintage Story

[TrashMammal]

Recently there's been a lot of talk about the newest release of a Minecraft mod called Distant Horizons. For those who don't know, it's basically a level of detail mod that simplifies distant terrain for a massive performance boost, which allows for render distances that were impossible without the mod.

Obviously the mod is made for a different game, but since both games are so similar I'm sure the technology could be ported to vintage story somehow. Vintage story is already so immersive, imagine it with a render distances in the thousands! Here's a link to the mod to see what it's all about.

https://www.curseforge.com/minecraft/mc-mods/distant-horizons

I'm sure one of the devs have acknowledged the potential of this mod, just posting this here to show ppl how cool it is.

[Streetwind]

Unfortunately, this specific kind of approach taken by Distant Horizons only works for Minecraft and not for Vintage Story.

DH works by taking a snapshot of a chunk as it goes out of loading range, creating a low-detail stand-in model from it, and presenting that model in the space where Minecraft itself unloaded the chunk. This works because in Minecraft, terrain generally doesn't change unless you, the player, are there to make the change yourself.

In Vintage Story, terrain changes by itself all the time. Chiefly through the seasons system and its slow but constant color shifting, and through the snow accumulation/melting system. That means that presenting a static stand-in model for a chunk results in that model becoming more and more visibly outdated as time passes. You could have a chunk that looks like a green summer field sitting right next to the border of your snow-covered surroundings in the middle of winter.

If you'd like a more visual example, look at the world map in 1.18 (or even in 1.19 with color-accurate world map enabled) after roughly an ingame year of play. You will have weird color seams all over the place, and regions that are shown snowed-in even though winter is long past, and so on. That is the exact same thing: the map is built out of 2D snapshots of terrain, and these snapshots are static while outside your loading range. Only if you walk there, you update them. A static LOD-based solution for distant terrain would have that problem, except that it'd be in your face all the time and look all the more awful for it.

No, VS needs a different system, one that accounts for the fact that even the most distant terrain needs at least occasional dynamic updates to prevent it from going visually out of sync, all while not murdering your hardware with a hatchet.

The team has actually toyed around with this in the past (this image is from summer 2023, showing an example of ultra-low-res terrain for ultra-high view distances). So who knows, maybe something like that will come eventually.

In the meantime, VS still has the advantage of having up to 1536 blocks of real, fully simulated view distance, in cases where your hardware can manage it. In Minecraft terms, that's a view distance of 96... triple the highest possible value under unmodded Minecraft.

 

Edited March 27 by Streetwind

[Bumber]

On 3/27/2024 at 6:14 AM, Streetwind said:

In Vintage Story, terrain changes by itself all the time. Chiefly through the seasons system and its slow but constant color shifting, and through the snow accumulation/melting system. That means that presenting a static stand-in model for a chunk results in that model becoming more and more visibly outdated as time passes. You could have a chunk that looks like a green summer field sitting right next to the border of your snow-covered surroundings in the middle of winter.

Looks like DH would support changing of seasons for grass.

Snow coverage is probably close to the same solution. VS needs to do something about the map being outdated anyway, so it's a two-for-one deal.

Edited March 30 by Bumber