Forums » Suggestions
Draw distance increase
Would like to see this added as an option.
Seeing hardware that has a hard time rendering VO is relatively uncommon these days.
The impact on gameplay should be negligible on the flipside sectors with large asteroid fields won't look wonky.
This is all assuming bringing this change in isn't too large a headache - appending the option with "Experimental" will hopefully mitigate whatever complaints that might arise from game crashes and other potential snafus.
Seeing hardware that has a hard time rendering VO is relatively uncommon these days.
The impact on gameplay should be negligible on the flipside sectors with large asteroid fields won't look wonky.
This is all assuming bringing this change in isn't too large a headache - appending the option with "Experimental" will hopefully mitigate whatever complaints that might arise from game crashes and other potential snafus.
I've written about this issue before, on some other threads, it is in the general TODO.
It is not simply an issue of "increasing the draw distance", there are challenges around the limited precision available on GPUs at extremely large distances, of the kind you find in a space environment.
Beyond that, we're also drastically increasing the "density" of sectors, as part of the universe redux, which is going to make things a bit more challenging for all hardware.
We have a solution for all of the above.. which I'm is a bit beyond the scope of this response; but it's a group of a number of different techniques that will end up improving draw-distance, while also increasing performance across all devices.
However, it has some engineering, profiling and testing time associated with it, and it was not prioritized over the recent server-side work.
Seeing hardware that has a hard time rendering VO is relatively uncommon these days.
One other thing to note is that.. we spent a hell of lot of energy making the game render fast on "mobile GPU" VR devices. Maintaining a solid framerate over 60fps is not without its challenges. So, the above assumption should not be taken for granted.
VR requirements are nothing like your usual PC or mobile gaming experience, where framerate dropouts are just a slight inconvenience. On VR your user may throw-up if that happens.
Still, the solution we have should be a net-positive all around, but it isn't trivial to implement.
It is not simply an issue of "increasing the draw distance", there are challenges around the limited precision available on GPUs at extremely large distances, of the kind you find in a space environment.
Beyond that, we're also drastically increasing the "density" of sectors, as part of the universe redux, which is going to make things a bit more challenging for all hardware.
We have a solution for all of the above.. which I'm is a bit beyond the scope of this response; but it's a group of a number of different techniques that will end up improving draw-distance, while also increasing performance across all devices.
However, it has some engineering, profiling and testing time associated with it, and it was not prioritized over the recent server-side work.
Seeing hardware that has a hard time rendering VO is relatively uncommon these days.
One other thing to note is that.. we spent a hell of lot of energy making the game render fast on "mobile GPU" VR devices. Maintaining a solid framerate over 60fps is not without its challenges. So, the above assumption should not be taken for granted.
VR requirements are nothing like your usual PC or mobile gaming experience, where framerate dropouts are just a slight inconvenience. On VR your user may throw-up if that happens.
Still, the solution we have should be a net-positive all around, but it isn't trivial to implement.