Drawing distance problem

[Biboran]

So we all know earth it not flat. Games with small maps not care about it but for daggerfall it problem. Too much drawing distance feel unnatural but make it smaller will be not good too - you will see "fog" on top of moutians where you actually need see more land.
Is there a way to place tes 2 map on sphere of earth size?

[Narf the Mouse]

So we all know earth it not flat. Games with small maps not care about it but for daggerfall it problem. Too much drawing distance feel unnatural but make it smaller will be not good too - you will see "fog" on top of moutians where you actually need see more land.
Is there a way to place tes 2 map on sphere of earth size?

Unfortunately, Unity Engine's terrain is not that sophisticated. Most game's terrain isn't. The usual method is to make your own terrain system if you want your world to be a spheroid.

[Interkarma]

Daggerfall Unity's default draw distance is around 2500m compared to classic Daggerfall's 200m or so. That's a decent improvement, I would not agree that it's a problem.

If you'd like to see much more terrain from mountaintops, Nystul's enhanced draw distance mod does exactly that. You'll be able to see clear across the bay from high elevations. It even pushes out the fog range to suit new horizon, and no spheroid is needed.

In terms of horizon distance, a 2m tall person at sea level will find their horizon just over 5km away. That same person standing on a 1000m high mountaintop will see just over 113Km (weather conditions permitting). I can't recall exactly how far Nystul's mod draws, but it definitely does a great job from high places.

[Arl]

Maybe the curved horizon could be achieved with shaders or something like that (I don't know too much about it).

I personally don't want that, yes the earth is round, but actually seeing it's curvature in the horizon would be unrealistic, I think not even in the moon you can see a lunar curved horizon.

The heights needed to perceive a curvature are enormous, even on commercial flights over the ocean you still don't see it. If seeing the roundness of the horizon could be easy, flat earthers would quit arguing about it.


I remember a discussion in the XLforums where it was stated that the view distance was too big, and it was quite surprising knowing the effect of not having proper view distance/fog values. If you put too much view distance, with atmospherical fog also too far, and geographical features being mostly flat, you end up with a sensation that things are drastically closer and smaller than they actually are.

[Nystul]

I tried to do some compensation for world curvature in the vertex shader but it broke surface normals (and I was not able to fix it - actually it seemed to be another unity bug as well) so I dropped the idea

draw distance is about 100km at the moment - this can be adjusted by fog settings and blend distance (I think it starts somewhere around 120km and ends around 130km - so after that the mountains cannot be seen).

It is intended that draw distance is maybe a bit "too much" but I wanted to have some moutains show up until we have more interesting "near" terrain

bigger issue is that unity's fog is really bad (even global fog is as buggy as hell - and global fog image effect is already deprecated and no longer maintained by unity since it will be replaced by some fog incorporated in the post processing stack).

edit: I would like to encourage people to read other posts before starting new threads with issues and questions that have already been answered several times in different threads. Use the search function before please

[Biboran]

edit: I would like to encourage people to read other posts before starting new threads with issues and questions that have already been answered several times in different threads. Use the search function before please

Sorry

[Arl]

Nystul, I have a question for you:

In Oblivion and Skyrim there's this LOD model of the world that blends as seamless as possible to the actual cell you are in, and this LOD model can have bump mapping, other models, etc. Skyrims even uses this model to render it's world map, so my question is, do you think is possible for DFU to have a system like that?

That would improve the Daggerfall travel map a lot , instead of those several green and blue images you can actually zoom in and out a 3D map containing the locations in a practical matter.

[Nystul]

edit: I would like to encourage people to read other posts before starting new threads with issues and questions that have already been answered several times in different threads. Use the search function before please

Sorry

no problem
but I really answered this before somewhere

edit: here is the thread where it is answered the second time (in which the 1st thread can also be found): viewtopic.php?f=14&t=10&hilit=curvature&start=180#p2188

[Nystul]

Nystul, I have a question for you:

In Oblivion and Skyrim there's this LOD model of the world that blends as seamless as possible to the actual cell you are in, and this LOD model can have bump mapping, other models, etc. Skyrims even uses this model to render it's world map, so my question is, do you think is possible for DFU to have a system like that?

That would improve the Daggerfall travel map a lot , instead of those several green and blue images you can actually zoom in and out a 3D map containing the locations in a practical matter.

In theory almost everything is possible I think. But some things just take lots of time and efforts to do.
Maybe one day someone with enough skills could do such thing, but I think it is a huge undertaking

[Arl]

Nystul, I have a question for you:

In Oblivion and Skyrim there's this LOD model of the world that blends as seamless as possible to the actual cell you are in, and this LOD model can have bump mapping, other models, etc. Skyrims even uses this model to render it's world map, so my question is, do you think is possible for DFU to have a system like that?

That would improve the Daggerfall travel map a lot , instead of those several green and blue images you can actually zoom in and out a 3D map containing the locations in a practical matter.

In theory almost everything is possible I think. But some things just take lots of time and efforts to do.
Maybe one day someone with enough skills could do such thing, but I think it is a huge undertaking

I see, there's lots of things to do before that kind of goodies anyway, like having the main game fully playable for example, but I just like to dream of the future.

And don't worry, I wasn't implying that you should do it as some source of feature commissioner, I just wanted to know your mind about it because you are the most familiar with working the map so far.