terra121
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[Suggestion/Help] Adding 2D height maps beyond the edge of the voxel world to massively increase render distance?
This mod is great, but the low draw-distance of Minecraft really ruins the immersion for me. The Mount Everest images are a good example, what should be impressive just looks like a flat white small section of a hill.
Increasing the draw distance isn't an option because of the inherent memory consumption and similar issues with voxels. But I'm sure large traditional 2D height maps could be generated from the voxel edge to several kilometres out, and to the horizon most of the time.
I think generating a traditional Google-Earth-style height map outside the voxel range could massively improve the immersion factor.
I'm a software developer and now have tons of spare time outside of work, due to the virus lockdown in the UK. If you are open to other people contributing I would potentially like to help, so long as this isn't something that's being worked on already.
Is this feasible in terms of the APIs you're using, or would these type of requests incur to many charges or similar limitations? (although the accuracy of the maps just a few km out can be very low)?
Actually, the terrrain and tree api's have scalable requests. The OpenStreetMap data would need to be dropped (but you can't really see roads at a distance anyways. There is soemthing called cwg far plane view that does something like this for cubicchunks but it's generation is too tied to the world itself, the voxel stuff could be reused however. The only large issue I would see is water. The mod has built in water resolution of about 2km, but any higher needs openstreetmaps which is vector data so won't scale well.
I'm kind of tied up in with other stuff right now to work on it. But you could try making a fork or a sub-mod. I can mabye add support for dynamic zooms on terrain and tree data, at a later date.
i'd also love to see something like this implemented. i'm currently working on tunnels and bridges, but i'd be happy to help out. i could see if it's at all possible to port CWG to terra 1:1, as many people also seem to want this feature or at least as a sub mob.
It has been ported but was really slow. Im guess cause it repeatedly called the generators or somthing, so it really should be reworked.
I think a sub-mod would be best because this would change rendering so would definitely not be server-side only.