[Suggestion] Absorb or supercede existing LoD mods
jeancallisti opened this issue · 4 comments
As a professional developer, for a long time I was wondering why Minecraft doesn't make use of LoD or imposters. It seems like the first thing to do to optimise render distance.
6 months ago, I noticed that two mods have emerged that do exactly that :
However those incredible mods are still young and somewhat unstable.
Then I discovered Sodium. Sodium seems to be an absolute must-have foundation for any other optimization mod, as it's pushing in every direction simultaneously : data compression, multithreading, etc.
I came to this conclusion : You (JellyFish) should pick one of those mods (or start your own) and contribute to make the selected mod reach an acceptable level of stability. Or at least push to make it 100% compatible with Sodium.
Both mods are on Forge, if you have a look at the experimental branch some work is being done to have a form of LOD on distant foliage, the branch name as it suggests is experimental and shouldn't be used for anything other than testing really, but something like this is already being looked into.
In this case it's more about having LoD on (very) distant chunks -- the entirety of the chunk. The side facing the player being cached as a 2D image. Or only the surface-level blocks. Etc.
We have plans to implement a basic level-of-detail system which can eliminate distant geometry without significantly impacting visual quality. This work already exists in the 0.4-experiments branch of Sodium.
