Variable draw distance by type

I have seen a couple of things today that have made me realize something about SL. First, I played around with recording movies. I asked myself, "What would my friends think of SL if they saw these?" I think what they'd notice first is the draw distance. 512 meters, or about 1/4 of a mile, maximum. It is almost never practical to have even half that. On top of that, there is necessarily a lot of haze. It reminds me of the "Smog Alert" days we used to have over a decade ago.

Second, I looked at some "There" screenshots. You can see for what appears to be MILES! SL looks so fantastic with the draw depth turned up to 512 meters, but that's really not an option except for special occasions or in vastly empty areas. You wanna turn your draw distance up to 512 and try flying through Lusk? Hahaha. Even on a fast rig like mine, that's not going to be fun. On my old machine I had to end-task SL to recover from 512-meter draw distances.

I think everyone knows WHY higher draw distances are impractical, so I propose we get around the problem by allowing users to adjust WHAT gets drawn, with a separate slider for each.

1. Objects (the most CPU-intensive by far)
   
2. Trees
   
3. Land and Water (I want to set this way high)
   
4. Clouds (This too)
   
5. Bumpiness (oops... we already have that)
   
6. Avatars
   
7. Particles
   

I'd like to have the maximum draw distance for land, water, and clouds set to a minimum of one kilometer. Obviously higher = better. I can do with objects at 100-150 meters rather than 200 (which is what I have now) if it means I can see further land-wise. I'm sure I'm not the only one who would be willing to make that trade.

This is a GREAT idea Huns. Turning up land draw distance but turning off others would be great.

Seriously, it looks bad when you see pieces of land cut off and an endless abyss of blue below it. I would love to see all the landscaping as for as my alt-zoom can go(this would make the view for vehicles a lot better), objects arent a big thing to me though, seeing around 200 meters for objects is fine, but 200 meters of land, NO WAY.

I'd also like to be able to adjust the level-of-detail shift points for the land. Seacliff looks downright ugly when viewed from a distance right now.

doesn't land take an extraordinary number of cycles to render? i've been told that next to rendering avs, it's the prim cause of lag.

i'd love this feature if it's practicle.

I don't think land causes much lag... just from experience, I could turn my draw distance up pretty high in some of the new empty sims before getting any lag (I think even at highest I wasn't that bad).

I would love to see your idea implemented Huns.

And I hate that fog also.

Land drawing gives you the choice of three levels of detail. Even when I was using a GeForce 2 I barely saw a drop in FPS from cranking land rendering up to full detail.

I'll tell you what I've observed about land. Flying at high speed, you often don't start loading the land from the sim you're approaching until you're right on top of it. But once you cross the border, it loads very quickly. It's the objects that take forever and a day. Land is nothing more than a heightmap with some texturing information and takes far less effort to transmit than thousands of primitives and trees and whatever else. It also doesn't require as much effort to work with in memory. It's when your RAM starts filling up with thousands of object descriptors and your CPU has to churn through all of them to figure out what to draw that you start getting lower FPS.

Of course the #1 cause of lag is large groups of avatars. Land is nothing compared to what they do to a sim.