Option to restore object draw distance? (vehicles, birds nests etc)

[Me]

Tested this in game with View Distance: High, Terrain Quality: Ultra, and Object Quality: Ultra in settings and you can see birds nests render at 20m. Previously in A20 you could see them at around 3-5x that distance. Also if you're cruising down a road vehicles will draw in not too far in front of you and it just feels really bad, like the game is regressing in terms of visual appearance for the sake of lower end hardware performance. Not to mention you miss out on some resources simply because the draw distance was severely reduced even on " Ultra "

I understand that for performance reasons all of this was modified / reduced but for players with modern hardware this is a degrading experience from A20, affecting both aesthetics and gameplay.

Can we have "High & Ultra" restored to a more realistic view distance and allow the user the ability to customize their own performance experience?

I'm about to test some console commands to see if that makes a difference or not, but the options menu should allow the user to tailor their own experience for this.

[SGT. D]

I've noticed this as well. Ultra settings now seem more like the Medium settings from A20 and before. Not in image quality, just in performance in areas like object draw distance.

Maybe it's something they will address as they work on this build.

[Kryzx]

I'm hoping that changes when A21 gets a stable release, but I'm not holding my breath since their trying to get better performance & optimization for the low-end users.

I guess we can always "downgrade" to previous builds? Sad....

[Jonnson]

I have to admit that having corn pop up 5 ft away is annoying. I'm in a corn field and don't even know it.

[Me]

I tested this a bit with some console commands but didn't see any change in game. If there's any able modders out there that know how to change this that information would be very welcome here. Thanks in advance.

[James]

Maschinenkanone, I just wanted to let you know that your post did not completely fall on deaf ears. I'm not sure why this issue isn't being brought up as much as it should.

I read your post 5 days ago and we (meaning myself and a group of friends) have tried everything we can to fix this problem but unfortunately it's an internal issue than can only be fixed by The Fun Pimps themselves.

I mentioned this problem to our group in A20, but at the time I chalked it up to having inferior hardware below the norm since most people on our servers never experienced what I was seeing (not to the same extent any how). But now EVERYONE is having the same issue in A21 and I used this very same thread to bring light to the problem again and a few of us have spent the last 5 days trying to create a working mod to fix it and have also tried testing different AMD and nvidia configs but to no avail.

We have, collectively, come to the same conclusion that there's nothing any of us can do about it until TFP fixes the problem on their end. So it's not your system or video settings. It's problem that needs to be fixed.

I also noticed the problem in a recent Neebs video. A well known youtube group who are very well off and are undoubtedly playing the game with high-end PC's. Simon was testing A21 and you can see the problem here: 19:31

https://youtu.be/Tyn87By5ODM?t=1171

(watch the garbage pile not appear until he gets close.

[James]

The performance is better A21 than it was in A20 but it also comes as a cost to rendering (i.e items AND zombie spawns). I don't exactly see that as being "better".

[daggaz]

It's especially fun when you are dying of the sickness, and you can't find any stumps.

[Shintai]

I have to agree as well, I get the system was done to improve performance. But it´s effect feels devastating on gameplay.

[MoistGamer]

I like breaking the giant boulders to get rock (as opposed to getting rock as a byproduct of mining). I used to be able to see them from quite a distance on ultra. Now they pop in before my very eyes and I'm driving around in concentric circles to find them.

[kir-kanos]

Originally posted by Shintai:

I have to agree as well, I get the system was done to improve performance. But it´s effect feels devastating on gameplay.

About to drop this game i can deal with rain inside buildings, no jars BS heat gen, But pop-in is a game killer and it is really bad in A21. Funny too getting from 20-30 fps less everywhere i go or anything i do. Nothing like driving to next city in the woods and hitting rocks left and right because they will not render in till like 5m away.
Also soo many dam textures will not show right at all till very close to them (trader walls).
Really did love all the little things that A21 has but this pop-in really is a game killer.
P.S had way better fps early a20 running a dam 1070 same settings.

[CatPerson]

The thing that's bothered me the most personally for a long while re: draw distance is grass distance and light sources. Some environmental pop-in is a lot less noticeable/annoying when it's darker/cloudy/rainy, so having weather always like that "helps", haha. But nothing helps with the lights pop in.

Many (many) Alpha's ago I used to put up chains of 3 block high posts and stick torches on them to create wilderness "light paths". Back then I could place them fairly far apart from each other and still at least see the small glow of torch itself in the distance as a marker. Then one Alpha reduced the light draw distance maybe in half. This was done for performance reasons.

FFWD to today and the lamp light, torch light, almost any light source etc snuffs out/disappears after what feels 15 feet. Maybe I exaggerate a tad but it's very noticeable - base entirely dark as you approach, have to get pretty close before they suddenly light up like a Xmas tree

Anyway, I've tried stuff like changing the actual registry entries higher before, but since higher doesn't exist, all that does is default view to shortest I think.

Performance reasons are fine and all, I get it, but they have gone a bit overboard imo and they should at least still include another notch or two - or three - higher for those with PC's that can handle it (or for those that don't mind giving up fps or other settings for it etc).

Oh well. It's annoying but for me not a deal breaker. At least I'm lucky enough to actually like it 100% cloudy and rainy. hahaha.

[nowhere man]

Originally posted by James:

The performance is better A21 than it was in A20 but it also comes as a cost to rendering (i.e items AND zombie spawns). I don't exactly see that as being "better".

Plus, the performance in bigger town centers are even more atrociously bad than in a20, I noticed that. So this release is undoubtedly way worse in performance. It makes the game look a little better, with better lighting for sure, but it runs like garbage.

[James]

Originally posted by nowhere man:

Plus, the performance in bigger town centers are even more atrociously bad than in a20, I noticed that. So this release is undoubtedly way worse in performance. It makes the game look a little better, with better lighting for sure, but it runs like garbage.

Yeah. We've tested performance in both solo and multi using a variety of different components (In fact, I just ordered parts to build another system to test too) and the results have been disappointing.

What makes all of this even worse is that we were all being led to believe they worked hard to improve performance for A21. And yeah...I guess they did improve it, by definition, but certainly not in a ideal way.

CatPerson absolutely nailed it here;

Performance reasons are fine and all, I get it, but they have gone a bit overboard imo and they should at least still include another notch or two - or three - higher for those with PC's that can handle it (or for those that don't mind giving up fps or other settings for it etc).

And just to double down here. Look at the A21 diary notes. This part in particular;

Graphics Improvements

Shadows re-enabled on grass, based on quality settings

What good is having shadows on grass when the grass don't even render in past 20 blocks. This seems like such an unnecessary waste of time.

Oh well. I guess we'll have to wait to see if they fix it or not.

[Mardoin69]

I'd almost believe @CatPerson is from WA, USA based on their response about weather, lol. I say this cuz I had grown up there and it rains 24 / 7 seems like. Always dark / gloomy and raining... about 300 days of the year (if not more.)

Anyway... the whole topic--render distance--is going to be something a LOT of people are going to be fairly irritated with. TFP really needs to re-think their whole Pre-set settings for video. Maybe instead of taking away our ability to increase draw distance, just keep their settings in the pre-sets and allow us to bump them up some more if we want. I hate 'pop-in' effect... so immersion breaking. Nothing worse than driving down a road at full speed on a motorcycle with speed boost mod and have a car 'pop-in' when you're not expecting it... Looking off to the side of the road? *SMASH* just ran into a dead car in the road. Ugh.

[Me]

I have a couple of thoughts about the larger picture here and the decisions that TFP are making that might be the root cause of all of this.

The first is that, as far as I know, this is developed on the Unity engine and since this game has been in development for such a long time that they've kept adding more and more visual features to the game but the game engine might not be designed and / or isn't able to optimally support these features because the fact is you get what you pay for.

I believe Unity is freeware as opposed to say using Unreal engine 5 which for a medium sized or larger professional game studio probably is a significant expense. My point being that if you go back and look at what this game looked like when they first started versus now you can see that in essence it's an entirely different game altogether. So, that free game engine 10+ years ago might have suited that 10 year old game just fine but fast forward to today and all of those years later and all of those updates to the game and added features and now Unity isn't the optimal choice platform for this game to run on.


This is a very common scenario that plays out for a lot of game developers and it's now putting TFP in between a rock and a hard place of trying to decide what to have. A game that looks out-dated but performs "decently" or a game that looks modern and somewhat similar to other new game titles coming out of the current age but doesn't perform nearly as good.


It 'can be' a tough nut to crack because you have two different groups of people, some care more about visual appearance and others only really care about how the game performs and now TFP are trying to have their cake and eat it too but are finding that Unity just doesn't have what it takes to accommodate all of the features they want to have in their game.


The second thought is that they are trying to tap into the console market again with their recently reacquired console rights and they are also having to lean in the direction of getting that to be 'playable' on a console. You can image that if the game was running as poorly as it was on a high end gaming PC how would all of this newer content do on current consoles? My guess is, abysmal. Which would explain why they are making severe changes to draw distance and such, in order to get the game ready to barely squeak by on consoles. I have no idea if they are doing the console version internally or if they're going to outsource that to another developer like they did previously with Telltale games. I assume since that ended up so badly that they're going to do it in house which would explain why they, perhaps, are only doing one development branch for the game. So that it runs on PCs and consoles. Now it may not be 'Exactly' like this but I bet I'm fairly close to hitting the nail on the head.


OK it's Dream Land time. . .

IF, and that's a very big IF, they were to port the game over to another game engine (doesn't have to be Unreal) that is designed in a way that it better supports modern features and hardware then they would probably (several years later) end up with a great looking game that also runs at an acceptable level. Somehow I don't think this will happen because of "reasons", probably mostly time & money.