Will the draw distance be increased in the future?
HYBRID1313
Australia Join Date: 2016-04-01 Member: 215179Members
Australia Join Date: 2016-04-01 Member: 215179Members
Hello,
I'm curious and hopefull; will the Draw Distance of Subnautica be increased (or able to be increased) after the optimization of the game?
This would allow the game to look a lot more like the concept arts, and what has caused me to say this is after noticing a Lava Castle concept art with the Cyclops and how you can see the whole, smoking castle and its spires. Meanwhile, ingame if you go up to the Lava Castle, you can only see a small amount of it and it takes a while to notice it. I'm sure this is being worked on (like with the fog and pop-in), but I'd just like to ask anyways
Any and all answers are appreciated
Regards,
Hybrid
I'm curious and hopefull; will the Draw Distance of Subnautica be increased (or able to be increased) after the optimization of the game?
This would allow the game to look a lot more like the concept arts, and what has caused me to say this is after noticing a Lava Castle concept art with the Cyclops and how you can see the whole, smoking castle and its spires. Meanwhile, ingame if you go up to the Lava Castle, you can only see a small amount of it and it takes a while to notice it. I'm sure this is being worked on (like with the fog and pop-in), but I'd just like to ask anyways
Any and all answers are appreciated
Regards,
Hybrid
Comments
It is unlikely we'll be able to do it for other biomes, though, as there is just too much detail. For one thing, there is a difference between a model, like the lost river skeletong, and the lava castle, which is made out of terrain voxels. The terrain voxels all automatically LOD already, and you can see it on the lava castle spires (they looks spikey and low poly from a distance and then when you get closer they get more rounded and detailed, but it is not as noticeable because the fog is currently so thick).
We do actually have LODs on many models already, but it doesn't necessarily make that much of a difference. Games these days can handle a lot of polys, and that is not really where the bottleneck tends to be in terms of performance. There are a lot of other factors related to those models - animations and gameplay behaviors that are attached to them, and just in general the fact that the Unity engine doesn't handle a lot of entities very well -- that cause the performance to take a hit when a lot of props are on screen at one time, beyond just simple model detail.
Still... What you've been able to do with it is amazing! I can't wait to see what you implement next. One thing I really like is that the only view we have is through the player's dive mask. There's a game called Infestation - a survival exploration classic for the old Atari ST - which does the same thing, but the view is even smaller...
... providing a sense of terrible isolation--and that's a good thing! It's the same in Subnautica, that sense of isolation; unless you turn you can't see what's behind you. I do wish. however, that more HUD elements or internal 'decoration' could be added - as in the screenshot above - such that we feel like we're seeing the world through the mask of an incredibly sophisticated, pressurized environmental suit.
In the screenshot here, top-left is oxygen (collected via oxygen packs), bottom-left is your suit temperature (watch that, you can freeze to death), middle is radiation level, and right is power (collected via batteries you find lying about in some rooms). The crosshair/grid in the middle is your suit's shoulder-mounted pulse rifle; not a KILLUMALL!!! weapon but something best used sparingly, as using it takes precious battery that you need to survive. The suit in "Infestation" also had some other cool stuff like readouts of oxygen / nitrogen, atmospheric pressure, avionics for the suits MMU... it was awesome, all controlled via the number keys on your keyboard!