Expose more distant terrain settings to the user
So far the feedback on object paging is it helps performance quite a bit for most people/better performance than previous versions. But with most highly modded setups performance is still lacking, since many high resolution textures are used and unoptimized meshes are still common in those setupS (when you use more mods you will have to replace/load them after Morrowind Optimization Patch to avoid floating and bleeding objects and actually make use of the better assets). Because OpenMW's distant land is high quality by default; sometimes we ask people with those setups to use the documentation and the additional settings available in the configuration files.
Having some more distant terrain settings easy to access and visible to users will surely help (especially since very few people are aware that OpenMW's distant land is high quality by default and that there are options that could help their game performance).
From personal testing, tweaking the preloading settings when using different setups (highly modded or vanilla...etc) helps quite a bit too, and is pretty much required to produce better performance and smoother transitions when crossing cells too, it helps with distant land as well as groundcover.
For distant land I suggest exposing the following settings that did improve performance for me between different setups:
- preload num threads
- vertex lod mod
- object paging merge factor (value gains depend on hardware)
- lod factor (but limited to 0.5 minimum, since lower values can have diminishing returns, depending on hardware and view distance)
- max composite geometry size (value gains depend on hardware)
Since refraction and reflections are rendered for the whole view distance, exposing this water shader option is needed too:
- small feature culling pixel size
Other settings:
- preload doors (better set to off tbh for most setups).
- preload cell cache min
- preload cell cache max
- preload cell expiry delay, and cache expiry delay
May help weak hardware but arguably shouldn't be exposed as changing those when it comes to helping performance is more of a hit or miss with the different setups (and the defaults are mostly fine on most hardware, and to keep the visual quality more consistent):
- object paging active grid
- composite map level
- composite map resolution
- preload instances
Should be exposed under the view distance option in the launcher or more to the point in-game, the groundcover setting:
- rendering distance
https://openmw.readthedocs.io/en/latest/reference/modding/settings/terrain.html