LOD & Caves

So, I’m messing around with a cave world, with some giant caverns:

The challenge with this is that the actual game client can’t render far walls/ceiling at most terrain draw distances. Instead, the sky and sun shine through:

We’ve seen this in other worlds to a lesser extent, too (long caves, etc)


Couple ideas:

  • If the game has some idea that we are deep under the surface, disable the sun and switch/fade to a black skybox
  • Allow biomes to define that (“no sun at y < 123”)
    • This would seem to fit well with the atmospheric settings that are coming for biomes
    • This wouldn’t work if players open a hole to the surface.

(also, it’d be nice to be able to specify ambient light levels for a biome … and range of y values :-/)


I could also make the cavern smaller, but :frowning:

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How wide are the caverns?
We may remove some of the current draw distance options as various part of gameplay require reasonable draw distances, and the farther lods are lower cost.

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They’re a biome, so potentially 1000s of blocks. The caverns are about 150 blocks high. I’d like to have very large caverns to explore and build in (cities).

What’s a reasonable distance, though? :stuck_out_tongue:

[quote=“michaelb, post:2, topic:4866, full:true”]We may remove some of the current draw distance options as various part of gameplay require reasonable draw distances, and the farther lods are lower cost.
[/quote]

That’d be awesome!

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I don’t know exactly how it would fit into the rest of the world building process, but maybe the best solution to that would be so simply stipulate that an entire world is subterranean?

That way, you can entirely do away with the sky, put a roof on it like the floor on the bottom of the map (although I suppose you could do that manually too), and always just show things out of view range as darkness? Then there wouldn’t be the performance issues. You still wouldn’t be able to see to the other side of a massive cavern and take in the splendour of a huge city, but you couldn’t do it above ground either.

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wow a 1000 blocks

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Holy ■■■■ i got mind blown when i saw that cave

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I kinda wanted to go dwarf fortress on it to be honest…

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That cave is something else. Such a badass idea. I would LOVE to build here. I’m thinking Menzoberranzan style >:D gotta get purple gleam in along with this!
Would also love to see a dwarven city like Tronjheim in a cavern like this that’s actually inside of a massive mountain on one of the planets. Although the mountain range would need to be be gigantic! (May have to manually clear it out for this one too)

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was that an Inheritance Chronicles reference? Eragon?

hahaha it sure was!