Today I tried to take good screen shots of ship I'm working on, just to discover that when you look at any ship in outside view mode, windows starts to disappear completely after about 100 blocks from the camera and ugly empty hole in armor takes their place. Is there any way to modify that distance, or turn it off altogether (like modify some game file containing value responsible for that specific distance, etc)?
It have to be, because the distance is neither zero nor infinite, which means, somewhere in game library is a text file, containing numerical value that determine this distance. I'd like to change that number.
No, you as a player can NOT change it. They are hardcoded values the devs don't give us access to. Only the devs can change the render distances on individual devices and blocks, and they typically won't adjust them as they purposely set them ridiculously low to help performance instead of fixing the root cause of the performance itself. Hopefully they fix this mess one day because it really makes the game look real bad with devices simply not rendering at stupidly low distances (like 40-50 meters for a lot of devices). If the structure is in render distance then all parts of the structure REALLY should all render. It kinda makes no sense to have, for example, a 200 meter range on a weapon, but unable to see the device you are trying to take out with said weapon unless you are under 40 meters...... Like, I get changes for the sake of performance, but this is not a good one. If I am expected to fight a structure then ALL parts of that structure should be rendering in within my weapons range, at the VERY LEAST..... Kinda hard to snipe out a jump drive for example when it only renders in at 50ish meters..... The devs need to fix their performance issues somewhere else, this is not the place to pull this crap, in my opinion.
...and then... Sounds like you were asking a rhetorical question. While the game exposes a lot of its settings in text files, it hides just as many if not more as compile-time constants that get baked into the exe. If you could configure this it would, most likely, be in the file \Steam\steamapps\common\Empyrion - Galactic Survival\Content\Configuration\BlocksConfig.ecf ... take a look at the entries with the word "Window" in them. I reported issues associated with window rendering distance in 9.n (i.e. you can find a POI in the fog by looking for the black holes of the windows at distance) and that's still an issue.
That is hella weird decision. Most games I played, hade configurable txt file with all kinds of values, just for that purpose. I mean how much would it cost, in terms of fps, on a 13k blocks ships, if my 5 windows would rendered correctly? It's not like "spaceships" are made primarily of windows.
