Camera Settings Section

This page documents the settings in the Camera section of the Settings configuration file.

near clip

This floating point setting controls the distance to the near clipping plane. The value must be greater than zero. Values greater than approximately 18.0 will occasionally clip objects in the world in front of the character. Values greater than approximately 8.0 will clip the character's hands in first person view and/or the back of their head in third person view.

The default value is 5.0. This setting can only be configured by editing the settings configuration file. The value must be greater than 0.0, but it's unclear if the engine enforces this limitation.

small feature culling

This boolean setting determines whether objects that render to a few pixels or smaller will be culled (not drawn). It generally improves performance to enable this feature, and by definition the culled objects will be very small on screen. It appears that the default definition of "small" in OpenSceneGraph is 2x2 pixels.

The default value is true. This setting can only be configured by editing the settings configuration file.

viewing distance

This floating point values controls the maximum visible distance (also called the far clipping plane). Larger values significantly improve rendering in exterior spaces, but also increase the amount of rendered geometry and significantly reduce the frame rate. This value interacts with the exterior cell load distance setting in that it's probably undesired for this value to provide visibility into cells that have not yet been loaded. When cells are visible before loading, the geometry will "pop-in" suddenly, creating a jarring visual effect. To prevent this effect, this value must be less than:

  8192 * exterior cell load distance - 1024

The constant 8192 is the size of a cell, and 1024 is the threshold distance for loading a new cell. Additionally, the field of view setting also interacts with this setting because the view frustrum end is a plane, so you can see further at the edges of the screen than you should be able to. This can be observed in game by looking at distant objects and rotating the camera so the object are near the edge of the screen. As a result, this setting setting should further be reduced by a factor that depends on the field of view setting. In the default configuration this reduction is 7%. Using this factor, approximate values recommended for other exterior cell load distance settings are: 14285 for 2 cells, 21903 for 3 cells, 29522 for 4 cells, and 35924 for 5 cells.

Reductions of up to 25% or more can be required to completely eliminate pop-in for wide fields of view and long viewing distances near the edges of the screen, but such situations are unusual and probably not worth the performance penalty introduced by loading geometry obscured by fog in the center of the screen. See RenderingManager::configureFog for the relevant source code.

Enabling the distant land setting is an alternative to increasing exterior cell load distance. Note that the distant land setting does not include rendering of distant static objects, so the resulting visual effect is not the same.

The default value is 6666.0. This setting can be adjusted in game from the ridiculously low value of 2000.0 to a maximum of 6666.0, using the View Distance slider in the Detail tab of the Video panel of the Options menu.

Prior to OpenMW version 0.37, this option was in a section of its own named Viewing distance. This paragraph documents the former behavior. The default value was 4800.