What’s this? I can see the Ghostfence all the way from Ald-Ruhn and my fps is above 10. This is OpenMW and not MGE XE, right?
This is OpenMW alright and what you’re seeing is made possible by the newest addition from scrawl – distant terrain. This new feature is available in the latest OpenMW commit and if you’re on windows, you can download it from Ace’s nightly builds to try it out yourself.
So what does it do? In short, it simplifies the land mesh, nothing else. It doesn’t touch on scripts, NPCs and statics, but having simplified land certainly lightens the workload to a point where we can have some wiggle room with our view distance. Distant statics is another feature that will have to be implemented at a later stage.
You may have noticed that I’ve taken use of this in some of the screenshots and loaded enough statics to create the illusion that there are objects as far as the eye can see. You can only spot empty land if I purposefully look at something very distant.
Finally, here is how you set this up:
[Camera]
# Determines how much land is rendered. Add another 6 or 66 to it.
viewing distance = 6666.0
[Terrain]
# The on-switch to distant terrain. Set this to True.
distant terrain = True