Map-Specific Render Distance

[swifferpharbzzz]

As some of you may know, the render distance on the server was recently raised from 6 to 10 chunks.
While this is a welcome change for many maps – especially droppers, many open maps have been negatively impacted by the increase, and immersion has been ruined.

When these maps were built, the render distance at the time was taken into consideration to ensure that the player could not load in unwanted chunks. Some maps would be easy to correct, while others are virtually impossible to fix without hours of work.

As a temporary solution, map creators can add signs to the beginning of their maps recommending what render distance to play at. Unfortunately, as we know from experience, many of these suggestions are often overlooked or ignored. (What do you mean you want me to set my brightness to gloomy?)

Some examples:

Cliffs of Insanity: You can now see a large portion of Kino Love and natural Minecraft terrain from the start.

A Swift Adventure: You can now see the edge of the (fake) ocean and a map for a puzzle.

Festival: You can now see a large building nearby that is extremely noticeable.

The solution? A plugin function could be developed that would allow a map creator to assign a render distance limit to their map.
I was made aware that this function should be possible to implement, but it would take some hard work from the developer team. There would be a maximum render distance set by the server. For maps that have been assigned a lower render distance than the server max, the plugin would automatically lower a player's render distance while inside that map.

I believe this is an ideal and permanent solution. The server could potentially increase its maximum render distance even further without disturbing any maps that require a smaller distance. This provides a more direct solution than going back and editing old maps, and any new maps built would not need to worry about potential render distance increases in the future.

If you think this would be helpful for you as a map creator, please respond to this thread to express your interest.
Shout out to the developers for all you do <3

 

[FrananaSplits]

We love that large render distance for droppers and certain maps but having this would definitely save space and sanity when it comes to spacing certain maps out. I’d love to see this implemented

 

[anrein]

I think this would help a lot of people greatly, having more control over what people can see in my maps would be a huge help as a mapmaker. All for this personally!

 

[Mercata]

Oh, wow! Good lookin’ out for a solution, I wouldn’t have even fathomed that this was an option but I am 1000% down.

Especially given that render distances are subject to being expanded as server resources allow, it’s untenable (and in many cases, downright impossible) to keep updating builds to remain independent as intended.

My poor cliffs… ;_;

 

[wavelyte]

This needs to be addressed ASAP. It's not fair to simply limit the server distance at 6 as it is extremely detrimental to dropper maps as well as other maps which rely on far-away things (blight comes to mind immediately, but capping at 6 can definitely break immersion in some other maps). On the other hand forcing a larger distance clearly breaks immersion in a number of maps. There's no perfect number we can set render distance to in order to fix every map, so we should be working towards being able to change it for each map.

 

[BTJRedwing]

Based on my limited experience with server dev, I don't believe this is possible.

The server cannot control or see what a clients view distance is set at, it can only set a max view distance (that the client now actually respects as of 1.18) serverwide. I can't find anyone that has come up with a way to set this by region, and it may just be impossible. This is being worked on, stay tuned.


If anyone needs help patching their maps up in the meantime, please DM me over discord.