Telescope

[Ikaarus 28]

With all the time i have spent sailing the Yland's seas so far, i have had a couple of occasions where i feel like i cant see far enough, i feel like i have passed by a close island many times. I feel like a great remedy for this situation would be a telescope like the pirates used to spot land. This would not only let you spot land on your ship, it will also help you spot recources on an island and maybe give people a use to make a crows nest (i think that would be cool). Thanks for listening to my suggestion and hope it will be considered. 

[handofthesly 211]

I would love to be able to craft a spyglass! Definitely would come in handy for on the sea as well as on larger islands. Even multiplayer, so you can see incoming ships from your island.

[Ikaarus 28]

15 hours ago, handofthesly said:

I would love to be able to craft a spyglass! Definitely would come in handy for on the sea as well as on larger islands. Even multiplayer, so you can see incoming ships from your island.

Thanks for the reply, i totally agree and would love this addition to the game.

[Ericraft 6]

I literally was just saying this yesterday when I was sailing around on my first ship.

[Ikaarus 28]

23 hours ago, Ericraft said:

I literally was just saying this yesterday when I was sailing around on my first ship.

That's awesome! I too was thinking about this when sailing because i thought i couldn't see far enough, i hope this addition makes it into the game at some point.

[ComR 57]

Well, I thought it's already in the game, but I do not have materials?? Ylands is mostly about exploring and sailing right now, isn't it? It's a must! Following birds is good for start...

[Ethan Gordon Wilson 27]

This is an absolutely great idea, but there's the issue of rendering performance issues when it comes to implementing this, as viewing the map via a telescope would require the server to render a much wider area to view (even if it's the narrow "cone" inside the telescope's view area) and certain areas in view would need to be rendered with a much higher detail level.  The server would have to have a "render-ready" copy of the entire map somewhere in RAM, to be used whenever someone uses a telescope, which is something that would make even the most robust server shudder in its case!

There's a reason why render distance is limited in the game - polygons!  The more you want to render on the screen, the more polygons that need to be drawn, and hence the more performance-intensive it gets.  The math is pretty daunting:  for every X in distance you want to see from your position, you would multiply (roughly) 9x in performance overhead.  Well, that is if the game engine is rendering in all 6 directions in 3D; it'll likely be less than 9x, but even if it's something like strict land-sea rendering, you're still looking at somewhere on the order of 4-6x overhead per X distance.

TLDR: if you want telescopic vision, expect your PC to run about 1/9x performance of what it is now.  Take your current FPS and divide by 9.   Unless some developer can come up with some clever pre-rendering shortcuts to implement this, I don't see how this would happen.

[Aaron Sebenius 8]

On 12/28/2017 at 8:17 PM, Ethan Gordon Wilson said:

There's a reason why render distance is limited in the game - polygons!  The more you want to render on the screen, the more polygons that need to be drawn, and hence the more performance-intensive it gets.  The math is pretty daunting:  for every X in distance you want to see from your position, you would multiply (roughly) 9x in performance overhead.  Well, that is if the game engine is rendering in all 6 directions in 3D; it'll likely be less than 9x, but even if it's something like strict land-sea rendering, you're still looking at somewhere on the order of 4-6x overhead per X distance.

TLDR: if you want telescopic vision, expect your PC to run about 1/9x performance of what it is now.  Take your current FPS and divide by 9.   Unless some developer can come up with some clever pre-rendering shortcuts to implement this, I don't see how this would happen.

Sure, but in the wonderful land of PC gaming, a lot of computers will probably be able to support that sort of rendering, especially after Ylands gets into some more optimization stuff. I'd love the general render distance to be ~10-20% higher, with the ability to use a telescope to extend that by ~50%. This would also make multi-crew shipbuilding more fun, since you could have someone in the crow's nest looking for land. Even with a bit of performance degradation, it would be totally worth it.

[Ethan Gordon Wilson 27]

1 hour ago, Aaron Sebenius said:

Sure, but in the wonderful land of PC gaming, a lot of computers will probably be able to support that sort of rendering, especially after Ylands gets into some more optimization stuff. I'd love the general render distance to be ~10-20% higher, with the ability to use a telescope to extend that by ~50%. This would also make multi-crew shipbuilding more fun, since you could have someone in the crow's nest looking for land. Even with a bit of performance degradation, it would be totally worth it.

Here's to hoping. ;2)

[Soondead-27d3f9fbcbfb78c3 20]

Polygons isn't the most important cause for having a limited rendering distance in a multiplayer game that allows terrain editing. The poly count can be kept low using all sorts of trickery once the terrain has been downloaded from the server. The biggest problem is that the amount of terrain data and updates the server has to send to clients as they move around or edit stuff increases exponentially as the rendering distance is increased.

This is why minecraft servers define the rendering distance and decide when to send chunk data, not the clients.

Edited January 4, 2018 by Soondead-27d3f9fbcbfb78c3

[Gristle-4e5a1c0e661b6b1a 6]

2x Magnifying Glass

2x Steel Tube

1x hammer

[pumpkinboss 0]

There absolutely has to be some fix to the way distant islands are rendered in the game (they're not right now). I don't see this as an issue. Distant islands can simply be rendered as a few polygons until the player gets close enough. As it is right now islands simply pop into existence. As the OP said, you can sail past an island that should be within visual range. 

Edited January 10, 2018 by pumpkinboss

[Shea5573 0]

i was coming to say the same thing but i think it would be cool to have the option to have the modern binoculars as well

[Matthew fischer 0]

Also, holding a spyglass should increase the radius of map revealing as you travel.