Can we pretty please (with sugar on top) adjust the Fustrum of the camera? (For those of you who do not know, the Fustrum is a term to describe the field of rendering for a camera.)
What I want to edit specifically is the Far Clipping plane, and near Clipping plane.
Having the ability to set the far clipping plane would allow openworld games to be even more… well… view-able without being clipped for having a larger scale. I want to be able to see a city or an island from a very far distance.
EDIT: Not to mention developers on this platform are starting to integrate some custom Level of Detail scripts so that lower end computers can do more with more content. Which is to say increasing the clipping plane for lower settings would allow them to see the general stuff (like terrain, or user made triangle part terrain) but the specific stuff when they get close.
I think something to allow parts to be drawn on top of everything else will fulfil most of the use cases related to changing the near clipping plane already, without as many undesirable side effects for graphics when you can fully adjust the frustrum. (which probably isn’t as useful to begin with)
Adjusting the far clipping plane may be nice though, don’t know if there are significant side effects for that apart from that you get less resolution in the depth buffer.
A staff member already posted they’re not going to lower (or allow us to lower) the near clipping plane when it came up in a discussion about first person weapon models, and I doubt they’re going to allow modification of the far clipping plane for performance reasons – I imagine that will always be tied to graphics level. Luckily for stuff in the distance zeuxcg said they wanted to allow LoD, but they didn’t have any solid ideas on how to apply it at a general scale:
So really if you want to be able to see things in the distance in open-world games you should be brainstorming ways LoD could work and suggest those, because we’re probably not ever going to be able to change the clipping plane.