Currently, the maximum render distance greatly reduces the visual quality of places due to how hard the edge between rendered and not rendered geometry is.
One would think that fog helps fix this, but this is only the case if the fog color perfectly matches sky color, which is impossible except under carefully set up specific conditions. So you get an ugly contour that shows “here goes the draw distance limit”. Plus the counter can be bad on its own, depending on game.
Make fog blend into the skybox with distance, instead of forming a hard contour (skyline?)
Make unfogged geometry blend into the skybox with distance, to hide aburpt transitions and popping
Personally I would use it to hide the fact that the sea in my game is actually just a finite size box of terrain water. Currently it looks very ugly, and there is no way I can hide the hard edge in the distance. Smoothly blending into the atmosphere before the edge is reached would fix this.
Would also allow for some visually interesting games with very short view distance (again, fog doesnt really work for this, as it still shows object contours against skybox), and make chunk-based terrain generation/loading look not unacceptable.
Would go something like:
Shade pixel
Apply fog
Blend against skybox based on depth/distance and the value of this property
My current plan is to wait until they add the terrain LoD optimizations, so I can have water beyond the max view distance, but that is:
Wasted resources (when I dont need all that water)
Still ugly (because it gets clipped)
Im also using a custom uniform-color skybox, only because thats the only way to get a somewhat reasonable transition from fogged geometry to sky.
EDIT:
Oh I just realized, the part load distance can of course be made as small as the upper limit of this property. So it could be used as an optimization by developers as well (if you want high quality for individual parts, but dont care so much about view distance, for example - when roblox would normally reduce part quality to maintain view distance).
Well, and for fade-to-background, you’ll need a carefully crafted skybox that matches your current scene, e.g. the default Roblox skybox won’t do at all in a city environment, it’s very bright to be a scattered-to background.
While this is not a bad idea in general, it’s just that there are probably much better alternatives.
LoD = Level of Detail, it means roughly that terrain in the distance will be drawn simpler which means the game runs faster when there’s lots of terrain.
Currently I fade my geometry to fog, which is as close to sky color as I can get it.
This is 99% equivalent to fading geometry directly to the sky, so I dont see why it wouldnt work. Fading directly to the sky just avoids the ugly contour that is there because I couldnt match the color perfectly.
There are only 3 viable (and not so viable?) alternatives I see:
A) Practically infinite render distance (and when you reach the end of that, this property would still be better in beautifying the border than nothing at all)
B) Shader to fake curvature of earth, to hide boundary behind the horizon (while realistic, this has potential for subtle graphical glitches, and for same reason requires large view distance to actually work - plus things like shooting at distant targets will be completely inaccurate, so it wont work for every game)
C) Set color of sky based on color of fog (automate the current process of trying to match sky to fog color), probably based on vertical, adjustable height (so the entire sky isnt one uniform color). This would be a good option to have, but its still not mutually exclusive with fading geometry out.
Its just an aestehtic decision every game has to make. Some games it will work perfectly and even improve the look (beyond just hiding technical limitations of limited render distance), others it might not.
