Horiz0n - OpenMW View Distance Manager

HORIZ0N

Dynamic View Distance Management for OpenMW

I was discussing the concept of occlusion culling with someone recently.

I told them that the engine has no defense against extremely draw-call bound areas, such as Old Ebonheart.

However, I kept thinking about it, and eventually realized that was bullshit — because we do have frustum and distance culling. These are the oldest tricks in the book for optimizing framerates in Morrowind, going all the way back to the classic Morrowind FPS Optimizer app from however long ago.

The problem that I found with prior approaches was that they were all dedicated to the idea of saving your framerate at all times. You'd get your frames back, but they wouldn't expand your view distance back out when the headroom returned.

Thus was born, Horiz0n.

OVERVIEW

Much like its sibling, S4V3R, Horiz0n is minimalist in design and aggressively tries to optimize your framerate.

The way it works is simple:

• []Horiz0n keeps track of the fastest frame your game has ever rendered during the current session.[/]

  []It checks the current frametime thirty times per second, provided the world is not paused and you are not in a true interior cell — so Starwind and Tribunal should both work fine.[/]

  []If the current frametime is 10% worse than the best one recorded, Horiz0n lowers the view distance by 16 units. If it's 30% worse, it lowers it by 32 units. Otherwise, it raises the view distance by 16 units.[/]

  It'll keep going as-needed until you hit either the minimum or maximum viewing distance.

  Stop worrying about setting the view distance yourself. Just take a breath and enjoy the horiz0n.

  IMPORTANT

  In order for Horiz0n to work correctly, you must set a framerate limit in the OpenMW launcher, or manually in your settings.cfg file.

  YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.

  The fastest-frame tracking is intended to allow maintaining a moving performance baseline rather than a fixed framerate target. Consequently, Horiz0n doesn't care if you're at 60, 120, or 240Hz — it just cares how well your system ran the game during this session.

  The minimum viewing distance is 2048 units, which is exactly one quarter of a standard Morrowind cell. This prevents your viewing distance from ever becoming too short to actually navigate, even in extremely dem