Distant Vistas

I've always been a bit disappointed at the distant views in the Rush Rally series, they are very hard to get looking good with the whole procedural generation of the terrain and track. Any tracks that are created, generally need a good looking over to check that the view from the track is actually a good one.

There were always issues where you can suddenly see the effect break down and you can see the edge of the world, and the sky dome being "dragged" down to cover this up. Mostly I tended to make sure that the track side objects were plentiful to cover up any need to worry about this. The problem with that approach is that every track then feels very enclosed and has a tendency to feel the same for the duration of the track.

So I decided that I'd extend the sky dome approach and add the concept of distant vistas. These are basically automatically generated layers of polygons that will give a parallax effect when moving (which gives the effect of distance) but also they will hide the join between procedural terrain and sky.

There are lots of parameters available to control how it builds the vista, mainly so we can do rolling hills, mountains and trees. The effect though really does make the generated track feel way more realistic.

When you add TSO's into the mix it isn't as noticeable as an effect, however it is clear that the distance no longer looks like it is missing detail.