What about view range?

[Benji]

With the stunning visuals in this game, especially with some fine-tuning to world generation, having an extended view range really feels essential. I usually play with a view distance around 500, but when I'm exploring scenic spots (mainly in creative mode), I bump it up to around 900. On low settings, my old GTX 970 manages about 40 frames per second.

Recently, I came across a mod that significantly increases view distance in Minecraft, and now I can’t stop imagining how amazing something similar would be in Vintage Story. It could be the feature that keeps people hooked, pushing immersion and atmosphere to heights rarely seen in blocky voxel games.

So, my question is: Is there anything like this planned or already in development? Or is it still a long way off before we can achieve view ranges of 1024–2048, even on mid-range systems? I’d love to try my hand at writing a little piece of code for this, but right now, I just don’t have the time or energy to take on another project. So, for now, all I can do is dream?

[Maelstrom]

VS is coded in C# which is much, MUCH better than Java for gaming purposes.  Additionally, to my understanding, vanilla VS is about as optimized as it can get regarding view distance.  I'm sure others who are more technically minded than I will be able to better explain this.

[Streetwind]

The mod you're thinking about is most likely Distant Horizons, which does not actually increase the view distance in the traditional sense. Rather, it adds a new method to render terrain at a much lower fidelity, which it then uses to display chunks beyond the native view distance.

There's nothing that inherently prevents the same from being done in VS - but keep two things in mind. One, it took the Distant Horizons developer multiple years of constant trial and error and two brushes with burnout syndrome to get this working in Minecraft. It was a herculean effort, not just something someone came up with and put together on a whim. Two, Vintage Story's chunk handling is nothing like that of Minecraft, meaning we can't just expect to import the same solution used in Minecraft. It would have to be developed from scratch specifically for VS. Given the looming threat of how much work that might be... probably neither the VS team nor the modding community are all that keen to dive in.

That said, Tyron did show off a concept picture of low-fidelity distant terrain on Discord at some point. It might happen, eventually. Just don't expect it to be anywhere near the front of the miles-long development backlog.

 

Edited November 6, 2024 by Streetwind

[Benji]

Thank you very much for the clarification. I'm currently exploring ways to optimize view range performance.

It's clear that shadow range has a significant impact, but I’ve noticed that grass renders at all (or huge?) distances. Since there’s an existing setting that stops details from rendering at a distance I’m considering whether it’s possible to include grass blocks in that as well. Removing distant grass should noticeably improve performance.

The next step might involve swapping out other flora for simpler models with lower-resolution textures.

My coding experience in C is fairly basic so progress will be slow.

 

EDIT: I assumed it can be found udner the shaders but I did not find it. If anyone could point me the right direction I'd really appreciate it.

Edited November 7, 2024 by Benji
update