Raising Viewing Distance (@Coders)

[Wucas]

Hello!

I was just curious if anyone had tried to increase the view distance in Gunz. For those of you that do not know, one unit in GunZ is ~1 centimeter in real life. We are given 30,000 to view while playing.

Although 30,000 may seem like a lot, it boils down to the fact we can see nothing more then 300 m (3 sports fields) away, which would be like *THIS* in real life. For those of you who do the math, 300m is about 2% real life's normal view distance.

The current view distance may be nice for small maps, but it makes large maps impossible, as well as skyboxes kinda horrible looking, but increasing it to even 1km will add 37.04x more data (that's what you get when your dealing with volume data I guess.) This is why I was wondering if anyone has or could do some benchmarks and see if changing this value effects game play at all.

Here are some of the values that if tested I would like to know the results

#define DEFAULT_FOV		1.22173048f		// (70.0f / 180.0f * pi)
#define DEFAULT_NEAR_Z	5.0f
#define DEFAULT_FAR_Z	30000.0f

Also, for you coders out there, I would like to know the difficulty of maybe working in a system where collisions are not loaded until "x" units away from your location, or possibly loading low quality visual meshes from far away (like a lot of the older MMOs do). I know that the GunZ character model is changed to the low poly mesh in model.mrs, so would it be that difficult to do the same thing with GunZ map objects?

If you could have the game load low_*objectname*.elu from >60000 units away, med_*objectname*.elu from 59999-10000 and high_ from 9999-0, all a map developer would need to do is create a collision hull with hide_.

Not every game mode can be created in a closed city/ island/ tunnel environment, and I think the first step to branching out is to increase the limitations GunZ puts on developers. This one, imo, is one of the most annoying.

Comment, discuss, etc.

[MentaL]

[Ronny786]

Nice to hear that people are learning Gunz deeply :) Thanks for Info :D

[Vusion]

FOV is how zoomed the camera is to the character.

[Joe9099]

FOV is how zoomed the camera is to the character.

You donnnnnt sayyyyy

[qet123]

#define DEFAULT_FOV		1.22173048f		// (70.0f / 180.0f * pi)
#define DEFAULT_NEAR_Z	5.0f
#define DEFAULT_FAR_Z	30000.0f

FOV is how zoomed the camera is to the character.

Hmm, then what he can do?

[Wucas]

I know what they do x.x in short I was wondering how edits change how the resources (RAM/ GPU/ CPU) are used. Honestly I don't much care for FOV at all, I'm more worried about the view distance ones.

[Joe9099]

tbh gunz is a very low demanding game, setting view distance to high would cause more cpu usage when rendering, yes ok most of us it wont effect, but people with shitty comps would have problems, though setting a view distance drop down box would be awesome.

Though again, why would you need the view distance very high, as most maps are small, unless im missing something here? O_o

[Wucas]

tbh gunz is a very low demanding game, setting view distance to high would cause more cpu usage when rendering, yes ok most of us it wont effect, but people with shitty comps would have problems, though setting a view distance drop down box would be awesome.

Though again, why would you need the view distance very high, as most maps are small, unless im missing something here? O_o

That is what this thread is all about, seeing how much CPU/ GPU/ RAM usage would be present by increasing this value. The second part (when I talk about the low quality models) is about ways that you could possibly combat those increasing values (aka, loading low quality meshes the further away you are from an object).

Put it this way, at the moment, there are no large maps, but if you were wanting to create new game modes that NEEDED large/ open maps, you would not even be able to. View distance is not a small part of a game, but yet an important part of how things are perceived while playing. You seriously only see a total of 300m in front of you, which in my book is nothing.

Real Space 2 does have some problems, yes, but what I am trying to find is ways around those problems to increase the horizons of the game, not staying within this Team vs Team or Duel mindset. The first way to raise those horizons are to lessen the amount of limitations developers have on them while creating things, one of which is view distance.

Don't worry, Ill just research it myself.