[outlaw4]

Hello!

I am trying to increase the viewing distance of everything since I don't like objects "plopping" in/out (suddenly appearing/disappearing).

First thing I found was the "MaxViewRange" of the grass/vegetation. It was hardcoded to 10000 in ELEX.exe. I increased it to 50000 for example. It looks much better that way! (the .exe offset (GOG version) for the float value is: B3F578).
But then a new problem appeared: Since the vegetation is now visible much farther, it seems that "patches" of vegetation appear/disappear abruptly, based on the camera distance.
Please see the attached pictures to get an idea of what I mean.

It must be something like a separate frustum culling mechanism for vegetation patches, or occlusion culling, or something like that. Unfortunately, I was not able to change this.

But I found something interesting: The ini/config value "OccluderFarClip" seems to be 10000 as well, and when I move the debug camera ingame from the position where the grass first appears/disappears up to the position of the grass itself, it is about 10000 in camera distance.
Of course changing that value has no effect, as so many other values in the config file..

What I tried so far:

.) Find other hardcoded values in the .exe, and change some engine settings values in x64dbg while the game is running. No effect.
.) Modified numerous properties in Sector/Template/documents (Range = xxx, HighDetailRange/LowDetailRange = xxx, removed strings OcclusionMesh = "xxx"). No effect on the vegetation patches.
.) Modified parameters (direct3d constant buffer) of DXBC shader "compute_vegetationculling.elexeff". There is FrustumPlanes, CameraPos etc.. Changing the FrustumPlanes values had a visible effect, but I couldn't increase the viewing distance.

I would be very happy if someone could look into this with me.
Ultimately I want all objects to be visible from farther away and if possible, have a nice fading of the objects and no sudden appearing/disappearing.

Thanks!

Links (to compare by switching browser tabs):
https://upload.worldofplayers.de/files12/veg1_1.jpg
https://upload.worldofplayers.de/files12/veg1_2.jpg
https://upload.worldofplayers.de/files12/veg2_1.jpg
https://upload.worldofplayers.de/files12/veg2_2.jpg

[Bild: veg1_1.jpg]
[Bild: veg1_2.jpg]
[Bild: veg2_1.jpg]
[Bild: veg2_2.jpg]

[tombom81]

Hello, did you read <here>? (German)
see Level of Detail

[outlaw4]

Yeah, my LOD factor is at 10.0 already.

[outlaw4]

Well I think this is more complicated.. in case someone is curious:
I used RenderDoc graphics debugger to find that only a limited amount of vegetation areas (bunches of grass meshes/instances) is sent to the compute_vegetationculling shader, like 15 or so in my example frames. So the shader isn't even fed with all the potentially visible vegetation areas. That would mean that there is a pre-culling done by the engine and modifying the shader won't help with allowing more vegetation to display.
Next I debugged the exe and found a loop where these 15 areas are dispatched to the shader. Now I'm trying to follow this number 15 through many functions, structures and temporary memory (costing me many nights..), to a place where it is calculated by the engine. With a bit of luck, there might be a simple hardcoded limit found. But I might be out of luck and the engine might not support more vegetation visible, or the hardcoded limits might be all over the place in which case it would be almost impossible to find all of them.

But maybe there is a different approach? Maybe someone is on good terms with Mr. Pankratz?

Anyway I will keep trying, and I also have many other modifications in mind.