Yeah, I’m also planning to use barriers to restrict the player walkable areas, disguised as natural barriers (cliffs etc).
And, yes, I also plan to use cutouts for the distant vistas in the horizon etc.
Nice thoughts on this, tozan, regarding Mass Effect etc. It’s the kind of very useful tricks to have, to give this illusion of huge vistas, as you pointed out.
But I guess we’re getting a little sidetracked here. This post is more about tips on loading landscape actors, resolutions vs memory on disk, how to optimize this (if possible) without losing too much resolution in the terrain (specially the quads right next and under the player, distant mountains are not much of a problem)…
I mean, those mountains in the pics are areas that the player will actually traverse, explore. I attached some more images to help show this. The player will actually be able to climb to some peaks. Of course at some point their way will be blocked, to limit the level boundaries etc.
(Ah, the character in the pics, as you can see, is just the third person example character, with some tweaks just for fun and for the sake of practicing blueprints etc. I’ve put some burning flames under his feet with example content, after changing his default jump settings to make he fly a little, to reach some peaks more easily, look somewhaaat like iron man, hehehe. No relation to my game).