Grass render distance (possible to edit ?)

[Mav]

Hi!

I'm still impressed with COTW graphics and scenary realism even after all that years pass, and especilay with the vegetation and the lighting at close range. But i will ask if this is possible to increase the rendering distance for the grass?

My computer easily manage the game in full quality, and i really dream to increase the grass distance view to have more realism and immersion.

Do that maybe possible by editing some files?

Thanks in advance for your answers ;)

++

[PiRadiusz]

I know what you mean. In my opininon this is one of the reasons why vanilla maps still look better, than most newer ones in DLCs - less open spaces and better ground textures in the distance so the issue is a bit less visible. As far as I know, there's no way to make grass render on greater distances. At least not officialy. I guess it's just engine's limitation. Generation Zero, sharing the same engine and many assets, looks very similar. CotW made my jaw drop when I first saw it and, to this day, I consider it to be one of the best looking games. I am not even angry about animal render distance, but, well... grass render distance is the thing that bothers me.

[QLIQ]

Yes, in a way the engine produces very stable and nice image. Look at WOTH and the image has tons of artifacts even in 4k. But once you get out a forest it becomes very easy to spot animals because of the lack of props in the distance.

So is there really no way like it is possible to render animals to 850m?

[Andi]

Of course there is but you'd have to do the research yourself since it's not allowed to talk mods here apparently.

[Ripz]

would be nice if they added a new setting for this in a future update. computers keep gettin better after all. +1

[VictoriaHuntress]

Originally posted by QLIQ:

Yes, in a way the engine produces very stable and nice image. Look at WOTH and the image has tons of artifacts even in 4k. But once you get out a forest it becomes very easy to spot animals because of the lack of props in the distance.

So is there really no way like it is possible to render animals to 850m?

No, it principle it can be done, but that 450m animal rendering distance is more than just what you can see of them. It also has to do with the mutual interactions between you and those animals, so by putting in a cutoff radius, the engine code only has to instantiate animals (and/or activate them) within a circle of that radius, so it's a performance thing. Way back when the game was first introduced, hardware (CPU, GPU, memory) was less capable, so there are engineering trade-offs: sacrifice far-field rendering and interactions for a reasonable frame rate, given the minimum necessary hardware and even the recommended hardware. In 2023, things have changed, so what I'd like to see is an advanced capability detection module that would look at a player's system and decide what level of performance was achievable; so maybe on a high end machine it could set the render distance cutoff to a much larger value. Don't forget, you are viewing all objects within the area of a circle of that radius, which scales as r^2 (even worse if you consider a 3D hemisphere, where you are looking at a volume that scales as r^3).

On the other hand, what would be the point in trying to make a 600m kill shot when the ammunition effective range is only 100-200m for rifles? That effective range applies to the ammo's recommended class maximum value, so you can take down a class 9 bison with the 7mm Magnum (class 4-9, effective range 150m) with a double lung shot at <= 150m, but it becomes less likely beyond that. It also follows that you could take a class 4 deer out to a much longer range ( ~300m with the 7mm, ~400m with the 6.5 Martensson (ER=200m)). I wouldn't be surprised if the design of the ammunition effectiveness was constrained by the 450m rendering cutoff LOL.

So, the game favors fair chase ethical hunting, where your goal is to get in really close to make a clean one-shot kill; and to make it more challenging, an animal's senses can detect you out to 200m+ if you are not stealthy.

That being said, yes, better far field rendering of the background would be nice, and probably doable, especially if they want to play oneupsmanship with Epic Games Unreal Engine 5.2+ (they introduced a whole new rendering algorithm that handles far-field realism superbly, but it took them countless person-years of effort).

There might not be a lot of incentive to change the animal interaction distance, though - it could require a lot of major changes to other parts of the system.