Dynamic LOD Distance based on RAM usage

[ikabod-kee]

Description

Dynamic LOD distance

Sky Islands have more empty chunks, so the LOD distance should dynamically increase if there's a large amount of empty space.
Similarly, being in caves should dynamically decrease LOD distance.

[Argmaster]

I wonder, should we just remove the LOD values and instead have a FPS target and auto adjust LOD to get as close to it as possible?
We could measure 1% lows to determine if we are experiencing throttling.
Yeah but edge cases would be annoying to handle, when someone gets really low render distance because of disproportion between GPU and CPU power or infrequent memory bandwidth lag spikes. Running out of VRAM would also be risky, we would have to magically detect available VRAM.
We could add a "Dynamic" option at the start of the slider (not at the end, as we would have to scroll through all intermediate states right?)

[ikabod-kee]

I wonder, should we just remove the LOD values and instead have a FPS target and auto adjust LOD to get as close to it as possible?

would that not result in major fluctuations?
anyways, that idea is a different issue.

[IntegratedQuantum]

I'll assume that it would be based on RAM or V-RAM usage, as any other numbers depend on too many other factors (leading to fluctuations).

Though I'd argue we should provide the same visual fidelity (→render distance) regardless of where you are.

[Argmaster]

Though I'd argue we should provide the same visual fidelity (→render distance) regardless of where you are.

On what grounds? We already know we can't, based to simple maths - caves have more meshes than surface, as on surface half of the chunks is empty. I am already changing that manually to avoid crashing in caves.
Actually, render distance may matter even less in caves because half of the time stuff will be just behind a wall.

[IntegratedQuantum]

Yeah, good point.

Though to be honest I would prefer to have better culling for the caves (though I don't know how yet).