Increasing Viewing Distance?

I was wondering if there was any way of increasing the viewing distance for detailed objects. The game runs incredibly smooth on my new graphics card, and I think it's a pitty that I still have to watch things like grass, statues and walls pop up when I get closer - I'd be more then willing to lose some FPS to change this.

So, is there any way to increase my viewing distance or even completly stop objects from disappearing?

Do you have all the graphics settings set to max? I think (but not sure atm) that this is tied into the "Advanced" settings, but it isn't spelled out directly which setting affects what.

there isn't an "advanced" settings. anyways, GW can render those objects in 3D, since if you take a screenshot, the 2D sprites disappear. i believe a similar mod to kunt0r's highrez mod can take care of this... but i don't know how to write it.

Tsk tsk.

In GW - go to Menu - then Options - then click on the "graphics" tab. At the top of the window it says "Graphics Options" with a few drop down selectors and a "Visual Quality" slider. Right under the Visual Quality slider it says, in big letters, "Advanced", and under that are more drop down selectors.

P.s. - to the OP - Texture Quality and Shader Quality are the most likely candidates for what you're asking.

Hehe - a picture paint a thousand words in a high resolution:

There is no distance-changing ability. I believe that this is to keep things fair between different machines. You can adjust the quality of the terrain, shadows, and other such mess, but this deals with polygon count, not how far out you see. The viewing-distance is a hard-coded limit in the executable and the only way to change it would be to get the sources, change it, and recompile it, or hex-edit your executable. Either of these methods would render you unable to play online however, since they'd be seen as modified files by the anti-cheat.

bleh. in all my time playing, i've never seen the word "advanced". maybe i'm just blind.

regarding the distance thing: i believe it CAN be turned off. after all, kuntz managed to force high textures on everybody in towns, and it doesn't involve changing system files. the draw distance thing can probably be switched off in a similar manner. in fact, a command probably exists in GW already: if you take a screenshot, the screen flickers as those distant objects get rendered.

Not a "fairness" issue, only terrain features (grass, trees, etc.) gets reduced to sprites at a distance. Interactable objects (items, players, mobs etc.) always appear at the same (compass) distance (albeit as really simple models at first.)

Right, the overall distance stays the same. There is no setting for it in the configuration file (this is stored in gw.dat) and nothing in the registry for that to my knowledge. Adjusting the in-game settings simply change the texture resolution, polygon count, special effects, shadows, etc. The terrain quality slider does adjust the distance at which grass and such are rendered, but not the drawing distance.

What flicker are you talking about, Moriz? I never get flicker when I take a screenshot, but I have a 7800GS and even on max settings (like above) I maintain 60fps, so maybe that's why I don't get flickering?

Finally, shouldn't the built-in anti-cheat stuff that ANet has detect mods like Kuntz' stuff and kick/ban the player? I mean it's not like WoW where modding is allowed or supported. I know that when I stuck a new MP3 into gw.dat it did NOT want me to go online, claiming I had a modified file. I mean if this is allowed, what's to stop somebody from simply using a bot or some other lame-o hack?

kuntz's mod did not involve modifying game files. instead, all it did was surprisingly similar to texmod; though instead of asking the game to load a different texture, it merely fools it into thinking that EVERYONE is your character, thus forcing the game to render everyone in high detail in towns.

the flickering that i'm talking about is where all the 2D standin sprites gets replaced by their "real" counterparts as i take the screenshot, thus giving you outstanding screenshots. if i look into my screenshot folder, none of them have these 2D sprites. a mod that will disable these 2D standins will probably involve making the game think that i'm constantly taking screenshots, so it won't use those 2D standins.

Or we could go the simple route and simply change the function-pointer for loading the 2D crap to point to the 3D function. We could change the 2D image-pointers to the 3D models. Hell, while we're doing all this why not change the "TakeDamage()" method to NULL so we're in god-mode?

On a more serious note, what happened to this guy's stats mod? I have been reading on his sound mod (those are UT2K4 sounds, not UT99 which only went to "Monster Kill!") and keep seeing something about a stats mod that has me interested, but I can't seem to find it online.

Another note about his sound mod. The order was double kill, multikill, ultra kill, monster kill, ludicrous kill, holy s***, and it would then say holy s*** over and over until you lost the killing streak. Headshot was only played upon a headshot, and godlike was only played after so many kills without dying, regardless of killing streaks. Yeah, I was #4 in the world at UT2K4 TDM a few years ago and this crap is drilled into my head.

you are certainly free to try and get banned in the process. kuntz's mods improve the gaming experience while not modifying actual game files and do not give anyone any unfair advantages. i've been using his high res texture mod for ages now, and nobody will ever ban me for it.

Sadly, yes - the pop-up is unavoidable. I had exactly the same problem when I upgraded to my current rig: the graphical quality is so much better that all the niggly details like this are far more noticeable. It's like switching from an SD TV to an HD TV, then watching an SD broadcast.

Sortof.

This does seem like the only option, as long as it doesn't actually save 60 screenshots per second to my harddrive

Does Kunt0r still visit these forums? Because he's the only one I can think of that made something somewhat like this, maybe he'd want to look at this.

After upgrading to a 22-inch monitor I started noticing it quite a lot, while I don't even remeber ever noticing any popping on my old 15-inch monitor. I guess Guild Wars is just getting a little outdated, but I guess I'll just have to wait for Guild Wars 2 for some fresh eyecandy.

i've asked kunt0r, and the answer is no: he won't write it.

a mod like this is a lot harder to write than most people think, and he spent a lot of effort/time on the high res texture mod. he has no intention of going through all that again.

That's too bad, but I don't blame him. Writing code seems like such a boring job, and he doesn't even get payed for it

ArenaNet should've added some graphical enhancments a long time ago, I wonder why they wouldn't add something like this, which seems easy and makes things look a lot better.