So after some more trying around, I finally think I start to get a grip at how to change the whole quality settings in the Esenthel Engine.

I have to say, I'm now even more impressed with visual quality and how stable the frame rate is....

But there is one small thing that keeps bugging me.... well, its more like me doing stupid things and hoping now that I can somehow can make up for it, but anyway:

I have a heightmap with quite steep mountains.... if you climb them and look down, naturally the horizon dissapears in the "atmoshperic-horizon" Fog as its maybe some Kilometres in the distance (well, the map is 8x8 KM).... I also use the day and night cycles, which makes the sun go up and down. Now, at dusk or dawns, when you stand on top of a mountain and look down in the distant vallye (which has to vanish in the mist cause of memory constraints), you sometimes can see that the sun is "going" down much too low, cause the geometry that should block the vision to it has been culled away or hasn't been drawn yet.

Is there any possability to have some kind of a static horizonlayer that blocks the sun (and possibly also the atmospheric horizon) when the distance between geometry is to big and some "suboptimal" vision-angles are used? Doesn't need to be sophisticated, as I'd like to have it also vanish in the mist, but should make the scene mor convincing.


thanks


Gian-Reto

I know what you mean, but currently there is no such built-in thing.
Maybe you could try drawing some manual blockade with blend technique, and size of almost full view range, although not sure if this would help,

Okay, this might do the trick.... would I need to change a shader for that, or could I do that in the Render function somehow?

could I blend that with the Fog somehow?


And another question that is somehow related, not that important though (as I can live with the current solution):
Why is it that even with a (in my eyes) not so big viewrange of 1 KM, the memory usage goes up to 1.8 gigs when I start the game, and even higher when Irun around in my level (sometimes reaching 3 Gigs)? The terrain is completly empty at the moment, so I assume its just the Terrain itself using the memory...
With a viewrange of 600 meter, this was still at 620 Megs at start, and going up to maybe 1.4 Gigs.
I never noticed this behaviour with any other engine, it was more that the Framerate was coming down when increasing the viewrange (which, oddly enough, doesn't seem to be happening in Esenthel Engine... Which is very good news!)... to be fair, I never even managed to get 8x8 KM of 1024x1024 per KM Terrain into one level in other Engines, so maybe my comparison is somehow wrong.
I assume this has to do with the way that Esenthel organises the Terrain, which makes using such large terrain possible in the first place, and most probably is also responsible for keeping the Framerate up, am I right?

Is there anything I could do to optimize this, so that less memory is used by the terrain (other than decreasing the resolution)? Could the reason be cause I used one massive 8192x8192 Heightmap to create the terrain? Would multiple smaller ones yield better results, or would it make no difference at all?

hi, that depends on your terrain resolution

for ERPG2 I have view range of 1.2km and memory usage of 530MB

heightmap image for importing doesnt affect this (1 or many)

only menu "heightmap\resize"

so, I assume 1 meter per heitmap pixel is too finegrained for over 1KM viewrange?

About the other topic, would it be possible to integrate a "horizon" somehow into the Sky class, or to extend this class to contain such a horizon?