A Realm Reborn Camera handling change?

[Hulan]

Adding options C would not be terribly difficult. Just make a few small adjustments to the near Clipping Plane and turn culling on if it is not already. You would need to render the raw terrain (the actually ground, for instance) and character/NPC models on a separate render surface then merge the two images - basically a two-pass solution, one for the terrain and other characters that has a very tight near clipping plane, then a second pass for the features that has a near clipping plane equal to the distance from your character to the camera.

It would actually reduce overall overhead by culling out any objects behind your character. Meaning less rendering in the end.

Edit:

However, your third suggestion. A long time ago I was talking with a friend of mine who's studying game-making, most specifically the graphical aspect. I suggested that to him since I was really, really angry at the camera, his immediate answer was "It is not that simple". I do believe that the solution you are asking for is actually unexpectedly complex, specially for game like this.

If I was to hazard a wager, your friend was referring to the difficulty of removing a part of an object when your camera passes through it. That is the only flaw in the changes I mentioned above. DirectX is not designed to allow you to easily (okay with some fiddling it is possible) remove individual sections of a discrete mesh. This means that if there is a tree between you and the camera, the entire tree has to be removed, not just part of it.

Edit Mk2:

That being said, on further thought, I do not know if that solution would be advisable. Namely because it would cause objects to spontaneously pop into existence once they were in front of your character. A better solution would be to give the camera a collider that dispatched an event when it hits an object and automatically turns off the renderer on the struck object until the camera leaves the drawing volume of the object.

This solution is a little slower, but significantly more robust.