What's wrong with fog? A detailed analysis and Solution. (Elex)

Good time of day.
Decided to share some advice on fog in the game. Got me on this one statement in the blog "a Review of Elex, or why is it so praised and criticized"
Hytryyad wrote:
The minor technical problem of the game - draw distance. And I'm not talking about the vastness of the world, when you're with the edges of the map are eager to see the other side. In this case, the fog seems to be OK, but when in the cave you see a bright glowing spot, decide that's the exit, go to him, and the spot abruptly vanishes into a black wall, and you realize the game is not able to render a 100 meter corridor... It's sad and hurts your eyes in large indoor spaces and cities. Feeling that really returned to the game 2002, where such techniques were the norm.
This problem is NOT in the range of drawing objects, and in improper implementation of the fog in the game. Easily solved by reducing the density of the fog and increase visibility range thereof, using the config file.
At first, I downloaded ready FogTweaker, but the result did not suit me, so I began to understand myself.

So, what you need to do:
Open the file ConfigDefault.xml located at ...\ELEX\data\ini in Notepad or any text editor. Line 41.

What we have in the original:

{Fog Quality=High}
{Low Depth=96 SizeFactor=12 MaxViewRange=4800.0 f ExpDistributionBias=256 /}
{Medium Depth=128 SizeFactor=12 MaxViewRange=4800.0 f ExpDistributionBias=256 /}
{High Depth=192 SizeFactor=12 MaxViewRange=6400.0 f ExpDistributionBias=256 /}
{Ultra Depth=256 SizeFactor=8 MaxViewRange=6400.0 f ExpDistributionBias=256 /}
{/Fog}

Where Depth – fog Density (number of particles). – The effect is clearly visible when looking at the rays of light in the dark. The increase in value greatly affects FPS.

Attention! With decreasing values below 64, the spotlight will be some flickering. At too low values, the fog is almost nonexistent, which would entail the disappearance of the effect of the bloom (glow) around light sources.

MaxViewRange – Range visibility (in fact, it is the diameter of a sphere of fog around YEARS). – Increasing the values has little effect on FPS, but solves the problem of the white curtain a few meters from HS, arising in the interiors.

As you can see, for example, setting High (in the game, the quality of the mist - high), has a very high density and very low range.

Exhibited the following values:

{Fog Quality=High}
{Low Depth=32 SizeFactor=12 MaxViewRange=19800.0 f ExpDistributionBias=256 /}
{Medium Depth=48 SizeFactor=12 MaxViewRange=25600.0 f ExpDistributionBias=256 /}
{High Depth=64 SizeFactor=12 MaxViewRange=25600.0 f ExpDistributionBias=256 /}
{Ultra Depth=96 SizeFactor=8 MaxViewRange=25600.0 f ExpDistributionBias=256 /}
{/Fog}

All values are long and hard, were selected by me personally, empirically.

So, we have reduced the density of particles in 3 times and have increased the range of fog effect and actually alienated from HS, the border of the dome, where it ends the fog – 4 times.

As a result of such simple manipulations, the game in a fog High , it became less dense and began to spread over longer distances from GG that makes it more natural and realistic, and so solves the infamous problem of distance. Moreover, this add-in gives us a performance increase, about 1-6 fps. Depending on your PC configuration.
Screenshots:





To completely remove the fog, I would not recommend it, as the effect of the atmosphere (air density) that would affect the global lighting and large open spaces, far away, the LOD will be visible s (reduced textures used for optimization), in all its "glory". As if that wasn't great. Completely remove the fog, only makes sense on very weak machines.

So I do not recommend using values above MaxViewRange “51200.0 f”, since a further increase of this parameter is impractical, visually almost imperceptible, but increases memory consumption.

Other values, such as the SizeFactor and ExpDistributionBias (the size of the particles and their angular displacement) – change is not meaningful.

Try, experiment, pick up the best values.

Important! Before making any changes, make a backup copy of the file. If you change the settings, do not forget that in order to avoid errors, all the values in the Fog, must be a multiple of 8 or 16. It's not required, but such values are significantly optimize the memory.

Thank you for your attention and enjoy the game.