Graphical Upgrades

@captcoza The game uses PBR textures to mimic how objects realistically react to light. The game could benefit from real time raytracing. I mean even minecraft looks amazing with RTX and that's a voxel pixelated game.

@blazedrake100 They could keep the visible render distance the same for players and ships but make islands not look like n64 for those with high end machines. I have noticed even ship textures pretty close up going to a low resolution. That could be fixed and not affect anyone. People who spent the money should just get better eye candy without the advantage.

@captcoza No but also the new call of duty games will be using RTX and those are multiplayer twitch fps games that rely on ping.

@blazedrake100 I dont think he meant see further. I think he meant higher detail lods for people with the machines to handle it.

@captcoza it's not rendered in one giant plane, the game is rendered in small chunks so it could easily be done. When ships are far away they are even rendered as 2d sprites.

@captcoza That's funny you brought up ark because I ran it on highest graphics with my old PC. Over 60 fps.

@captcoza he is only asking for higher detailed lods. And rtx. The ray tracing will have a dropoff point, it won't render Ray's that are too far off.

@captcoza I am also a game developer. You can tell they aren't 3d models as at distance the sails always show down. They do not use a model. I also have a hard time telling which direction they are facing as it's most likely a sprite.

@captcoza either way the game renders in small chunks locally around each player. This change still wouldn't render golden sands outpost from the devils roar but the next island over could look more detailed and it has in the past. The dev's lowered their lods across the board. They could give higher end pcs an option.

@captcoza it doesnt change the fact that there's no reason on a high end PC to walk 10 feet off the ship and see the details in the ship change. They could add an option as it was reduced since launch. I specialize in IT network engineering and programming.

@captcoza I'm talking about an option for high end PC players to increase rendering details locally. Utilizing local GPU and CPU power to boost things client side.

@captcoza furthermore load times have a hard drive and nic card bottleneck. If I bump my graphics to the highest setting it is not then making others on the server load in slower. That is just false and not how this works.

@captcoza Cant affect delta time as that's just a standard timescale that is fps independent. This wouldn't cause any timescale issues.

@captcoza They did add some model slider in the settings so they could just expand on that probably. If you remember they also added a particle vfx option so it's most likely something they may add down the road. I mean even the new xbox scarlet is supposedly going to have RTX. I doubt they wouldn't try to jump on that.

@captcoza I believe they probably have partnerships with either nvidia or AMD. The addition wouldn't really be up to their gameplay programmers. I assume as the next year's holiday season rolls around we will see a boost in rtx market share which may make the effort worth it. Though I dont believe it's too complex as it's been added to old games such as doom rather quickly.

Oh my... What did I kick off here?
I didn't read all the posts, but I will reply anyway.

First of all, I am a game developer too - one of those programming guys ;-)

By increasing the the view distance I (of course) meant LOD distances only. Having enemy ships pop in earlier would be an unfair advantage.

And there would not be any additional server load since the models and textures are streamed locally. And by the way: The server does not render anything.
I actually think too, that the lowest LOD of ships in the distance is just a sprite but I could be wrong here.

The FPS is not a valid argument imho. Everybody would still be able to tune the setting to get the best mix of performance and visual fidelity.

Ok, so I feel the need to clarify the "Larger viewing distance (adjustable LOD limits)" request again.
By this I do not mean the maximum render distance. I think the max viewing distance (where islands, ships etc. pop in) is absolutely fine. What I would like is the ability to have higher LODs (higher detailed models) in far distance.
I am not sure how many LODs the game uses and what the distances are for the different object types - I never really looked into this - but as an example let's simply assume it's 3 LODs with a maximum viewing distance for player ships of 2000m like this (numbers are randomly picked - not actual game values!):

0m - 200m: LOD 0
201m - 500m: LOD 1
501m - 2000m: LOD 2

What I would like to see is an extra LOD setting that would change these values to something like:

0m - 500m: LOD 0
501m - 1000m: LOD 1
1001m - 2000m: LOD 2

This would simply make the objects look nicer when they are not too far away.

For the people who are still thinking this would increase server load:
Why should it? The ships still pop in when entering the 2000m range. By the way: The server has to calculate the distance between all dynamic objects and player entities all the time to determine which info the clients need. This calculation will not be affected by viewing distance. The only thing that could change is the amount of data sent to the clients. But in this case this will probably not change either. No matter if the object is 2000m or 500m away, information about position, rotation and move vectors, object type etc. has to be pushed to the client anyway. The only thing that could change is detail information like rotation of canons, status of the sails, which texture set to use etc. But this is a ridiculously small amount of data. Just some vectors and IDs.
The rendering is done by the client. The server does not render anything. It just gives the client the necessary information for each object.

Additionally all static objects will never affect server load in the slightest way. For example the islands. The clients know where exactly the islands are, which models they use etc.
Why should we not load in prettier island models earlier? The server would not even know about it, it would be a client side change. This applies to all static objects (everything that does not change position or rotation during the game).