Drawing Distance, Can we have it?

[Konachibi]

I was taking a look at this texture wibbling earlier when running around Limsa. I don't think it's mipmapping, it's sort of a 'level of detail' distance. Basically, your 'background drawing quality' option in config works on a scale, as it goes up, it draws the detailed textures for a longer or shorter distance, depending on what you have it set to.

But not just in a 'up to 500m is detail, then out of 500m is less detail' way, it sort of happens in multiple jumps. So say you have it set to standard. For 500 yards you'll have +3 detail, then from 500-1000 yards you'll have +2 detail, then 1000-maximum view distance is +1, which is really pixelated. This gives the illusion of having some giant invisible bubbles around your character, and when things enter those bubble their textures improve untill eventually they get close enough to be drawn in optimal quality.

I think if you could set the detail higher than what the config offers you'd probably be hit with some pretty serious graphical lag, so untill the games engine is tweaked for optimal performance, this is what you'll have to live with.

If it's really that bad turn on 'depth of field', that fuzzes everything out of focus from certain distances and stops the 'texture bubbles' being so noticable. It also chews up a bit of processer so don't be surprised if the games frame-rate nosedives when you turn it on

[Coldfire]

You really should research mipmapping. It's exactly the problem here. Proper mipmapping or mipmapping based anisotropic filtering provides a stepless-looking level of detail into the depth. Without it you have aliasing in the background. With only two levels of mipmapping you have a border between highres and lowres textures. SE implemented their own technique it seems. They only have background and foreground. That's okay for objects if you can't use tesselation, but for textures it looks really bad.

[Anty]

You really should research mipmapping. It's exactly the problem here. Proper mipmapping or mipmapping based anisotropic filtering provides a stepless-looking level of detail into the depth. Without it you have aliasing in the background. With only two levels of mipmapping you have a border between highres and lowres textures. SE implemented their own technique it seems. They only have background and foreground. That's okay for objects if you can't use tesselation, but for textures it looks really bad.

its seems like "no technique" rather then some kinda technique. And proper mip mapping like it is ... standard for like a decade now... (/facepalm) would help and give us a nicer feeling about distances. And it would make it much easier to implement a slider for distance controls as well i think.