Will the draw distance be increased in the future?

HYBRID1313

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

Darwin-Evolution

I also definitely hope this happens. The same problem is happening with the ribcage in the lost river, with the floating island, with the mountain island, and even with the seafloor in the safe shallows when you're diving your seamoth through it. The terrain takes a while to load there.

Victor32

Hmm, I've seen theories that once the terraforming and all the mechanics related to it get completely removed from the game, the terrain will load much, much faster pretty much eliminating pop-in issues.

Lightdevil

there is something called LOD's (Level of Detail), which decreases the more distance is between you and certain objects/the world in general. This works by replacing the object you see when youre right infront of it with a lesser detailed object when youre far away from it. As far as i know some objects dont have a lod yet, like the lost river skeleton, or the lava castle, or even the walls of the lost river. Once these LOD's get added, youll see alot more in these areas at once. (I am not sure about this theory, but i think thats how it is) Also what Victor32 said. TL;DR Draw Distance is something that naturally gets better when the game gets optimized, which will happen ALOT near the end of the beta.

HYBRID1313

Ah okay, thank you all for commenting

Squeal_Like_A_Pig

We are hoping to actually be able to increase the view distance in the Lava Zone biome, which is possible since it is so sparse. Possibly we can do it for Lost River, as well. We'll probably do some tests.

It is unlikely we'll be able to do it for other biomes, though, as there is just too much detail.

Lightdevil wrote: »

there is something called LOD's (Level of Detail), which decreases the more distance is between you and certain objects/the world in general. This works by replacing the object you see when youre right infront of it with a lesser detailed object when youre far away from it. As far as i know some objects dont have a lod yet, like the lost river skeleton, or the lava castle, or even the walls of the lost river. Once these LOD's get added, youll see alot more in these areas at once. (I am not sure about this theory, but i think thats how it is) Also what Victor32 said. TL;DR Draw Distance is something that naturally gets better when the game gets optimized, which will happen ALOT near the end of the beta.

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.

Coranth

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!