LE Dynamic View Distance Depending on Location

[Fallerent]

I am, as an avid Skyrim player, fanatical of graphically enhancing mods. I am also, however, demanding of smooth FPS and high view distance in games. After some research to no avail, I am disappointed albeit not surprised by this mod having not been created yet.

 

I am running on a Gigabyte AMD 7970, and a 3.6 GHz AMD QuadCore FX-4100. I have CoT installed, many enhanced towns/villages mods, realistic lighting mods, populated city mods, and despite hardware capability and lack of background activity I still experience lag when in towns and cities. When I am roaming the wilderness, I can generally get a solid 60 FPS. Enter Whiterun or Riverwood, for instance, and this can plummet to less than 20. This is obviously because of mods, however I would rather see this fix put into place than see my areas become uglier and vanillafied if you will.

 

My proposal is simply a mod that detects whether or not the player is inside certain cells/worldspaces, (Riverwood's cells or Whiterun's worldspace, etc.), or any interior cell, versus simply in the Tamriel worldspace or any area not listed. When the mod detects that the player has entered a city/interior/town, the view distances will drop to user-defined levels. When the area is exited, the view distances return to normal. I am inexperienced with scripting, otherwise I'd make this myself. I would imagine using triggers and Papyrus or SKSE this could be achieved with relative ease, and the most tedious part would be keywording worldspaces and cells as lowered view distance or regular view distance.

 

This would prevent lag in dense areas, those being primarily interiors and civilizations. At the same time, the density of these areas leaves physical visibility lower than that of the wilds and thus the lowered view distance would not be such an eyesore. Maybe it's impossible, I wouldn't know, but it would be a damn good performance boost if it were made. I forsee no possible incompatibilities or unsolvable issues involved, the only underlying factor being a potential moment of lag when reentering an area of unmodified view distance that is not preceded by a load screen.