Render Radius

[CHBrown01]

Is there a way to enlarge the render radius, so that trees, buildings, and other terrain features don't pop up, and so that there is not a hard horizon line on the edges of a wide angle view?

[Buddye]

Hi CHBrown, welcome to BOBII and the BOBII forums and community.

I do not know of a control to accomplish your requested task but I am not the graphic's programmer. He drops in sometimes and he may know the answer or someone else may know.

[PV]

(I'm not the gfx programmer, just a terrain modder.)
I presume you already have horizon distance set to highest in Options>More GFX>
and ditto for Object Quality (=render distance).

Edges of the terrain field should only appear at high altitudes with wide FOV settings.
This is a bit of an issue now that wide screen monitors are becoming the norm,
and it may get addressed in future. It is a bit of a failure of the hazing implementation,
where the haze colouring sometimes doesn't match the sky at the outer edges of the screen.
As with all 3D worlds, the terrain rendering is truncated, as otherwise most of the
rendering processing work would be expended on the huge number of distant objects
compressed into a tiny band at the horizon. CPUs now have much more muscle than when BoB2
came out, and it is possible that a higher maximum distance could be handled now, but
it would require a substantial amount of new code, and our coders' graciously volunteered time
is very limited, so it is not likely to happen unless a new graphics oriented coder comes
aboard.

Object appearance or "pop" is a separate item from the terrain itself, and is determined by "LOD"
(Level Of Detail) distance settings, a parameter of the objects. We have tried pushing
out the last LOD distance of objects, but last we looked, much of an increase caused
substantial fps penalty for even hot new systems, impacting flight performance, which
is the primary consideration, so the current maximum was selected. This is also an item
which can be boosted as machine power increases, and will certainly be revisited, as the
bdg terrain people are keenly aware of it and have already spent considerable effort on
it.

[CHBrown01]

Thanks for your replies. That's very helpful.

I'll look forward to the possible modifications you mentioned. My machine runs the sim silky-smooth at maximum everything, so if you make changes I'll be eager to try them out.

By the way, it's a fantastic sim, and I am so grateful for everyone's work in maintaining and improving it.

-C Brown

[Osram]

I am "the" gfx coder but PV has already said most that there is to say.

Regarding "popping" there is the LoD inside the 3D objects which for example determines when it will change from a dot to a square and when from the square to a more complex shape. This can be "biased" with the object quality setting.

Also, even just looking into the object list and drawing a dot for all objects would be too much work for distant terrain tiles, so for complete tiles objects are switched off. Unfortunately the code doing this is extremely optimised and hard to tweak.