Increased draw distance through texturemaps

Hi! I'm sure more people than me are getting tired of all the fog in the world, and would love to really see into the clear distance sometime. So here's my idea for something to look at in the distance:

The sims obviously create 2d texture maps for the Map system, i'd like to see these mapped to the ground in 3d. That is, give us a 'far render distance' and a 'near render distance', where the near render is done with prims, the far render is done with the flat 2d texture maps from the map. In time, perhaps the 2d maps could be heightmapped, to give a crude representation of the sim's surface.

There's a bunch of clever techniques you could try to get better draw distance without using plain brute force too, like having a falloff distance where smaller prims won't get textured, or loaded from the server at all. Or perhaps rendering the background to a texture and reusing the texture until the camera changes position enough for it to look strange. Shadow Of The Collosus and Trespasser does this to great effect (nevermind that Trespasser was a horrible game, it had a great ambitious 3d engine )

heh, this is pretty similar to what the 2.0 render is supposed to do. well not entirely similar but the idea is the same. To render distance differently so that draw distances can be increased. They're working on it.