Skyrim Camera Disocclusion System

I'm still on 1. 5. 9. 7 so AE isnt really tested

Description

The 3rd person camera in skyrim is really annoying, because skyrims dungeons and corridors can get really tight. So your camera is forced into weird angles and it makes it hard to see. This mod disables camera collision, and partially hides the walls that would have hidden the player otherwise.

Installation instructions

It's an SKSE mod. there's a configuration ini.

How It Works

In order to make this idea work, I had to do some pretty crazy workarounds. In order to view through objects that might block the camera view, the mod changes the near plane of the camera ONLY for that particular draw call. It then remaps the depth so that the mesh still writes "correct" (approximated) depth values to the depth buffer through some math funkiness. The reason for this is because I couldn't use write shader discard commands without adding this as a community shaders feature, as that is the only way to cleanly inject hlsl into the game. So you get this near plane hack, which works well enough, it just doesnt fade very well. The other thing this mod does that it has to disable certain occlusion systems. This is what causes potential performance drops. Skyrim is reliant on static occlusion systems. I don't know how to hook into the if checks for this, so instead I fucked up the system. Basically, if an occlusion plane is near the camera, the mod moves this out to some far distance to make it basically stop working, and it will do that dynamically outside. Indoors, it basically forces every room to be visible, making the portal system not do anything so this mod will impact performance inside interiors if your computer was already struggling with skyrim

In order to determine what objects to 'hide', I fired 8 rays from the player toward the camera, and rotate the rays every frame to make a histogram of detected objects.

Additionally, this code was written with heavy AI assistance. I wouldn't call this a vibe coded mod, it was still pretty difficult to make and without knowing what you were doing, you couldn't have used AI to make this mod. The math is totally vibe coded though as long as it looked right I didn't care at all, because AI is good at that stuff. You just need to get the coordinates and worldspace correct first.

Source