Gothic 3 – weird background

[bfn1]

Hi,

first off, big thanks to Ralf for the great work so far. Now for my problem: I am using DK2 and in Gothic 3 (community patch version) for all elements of the landscape that are far away (on the horizon) stereosopic 3d is way off. I see everything double. In the foreground it is fine. It happens only in geometry mode. Lowering separation in the vorpx settings brings the two backgrounds closer together, but they only fully merge when the value is 0, i.e. when there is no 3d at all. Also, changing the value of the camera height raises or lowers the background extremely. I tried a lot of things, including changing the settings of the game itself, but nothing helped. Is this a known issue? Is there a fix for this? Any help would be great.

[moarveer]

Did you try setting the IPD manually as recommended?

[bfn1]

Yes, I changed the IPD too, but, as I said, it is not a problem of being unable to focus correctly with my eyes. Everything closer than the horizon is rendered correctly, and in all other games there is no problem with the background. It looks as if the background is represented differently by the engine or something. Changing separation and camera height looks like moving the background elements around in a 3d editor – they look completely detached from the rest of the game world. Does it work normally on your system?

[Ralf]

The background/skybox in Gothic III isn’t rendered correctly when using Geometry 3D currently. So far there is no way to detect when it is rendered, which makes it impossible to treat it differently than the rest of the scene, which would be necessary to fix this glitch.

I would suggest to play this game with Z-Buffer 3D anyway due to performance reasons, at least outside. In interiors/dungeons Geometry 3D should work largely fine IIRC.

[Myrilion]

I found a work-around for this background / skybox issue.

You can increase the viewing distance of the high poly detail renderer in the INI file.

In the game folder (“Gothic 3”) there is a folder for the INI files (“Ini”). Make a backup of the “ge3.INI” file. Open it and look for these lines and change them to look like this:

DistanceHigh.fFarClippingPlane_High=50000.0
DistanceHigh.fFarClippingPlane_Medium=10000.0
DistanceHigh.fFarClippingPlane_Low=6000.0

These settings manage the option slider values. 50000 is the maximum value. So if you now choose the high option for the high poly quality slider in the in game settings menu, the view distance of the stereoscopic properly rendered world will increase drastically. You can even turn off the low detail renderer completely.

Outdoors the performance framerate hit is about 20%. My 1080, i6700K struggle to keep 45 fps in some areas. But to me it’s totally worth it. It’s not only more beautiful, but I don’t get lost that much anymore and have a much better feeling of being in the world.

“Gothic 3” really is a gem. To me it looks better than “Skyrim”. It has brilliant lighting (very artistic use of light and shadow) and an awesome streaming engine, that makes loading screens obsolete.

The only problem is the single thread code (they had to disable the multi-threading in a patch because it wasn’t thread-safe). That means its performance is heavily CPU bound and it will stutter a lot; especially when you enter a new zone and the engine has to stream new data.

So beware! If you are prone to motion sickness, there will be many occasions of very heavy stuttering that will make you sick.

I personally have no problem with it and enjoy the fantastically designed open world of “Gothic 3” in full 3D.

[Myrilion]

I found a work-around for this bug.

You can set the view distance of the high detail polygon renderer to the maximum value of 50000.0 in the INI file.

Open the “Ini” folder in the game directory. Make a backup of the “ge3.INI” file. Edit following lines to look like this:

DistanceHigh.fFarClippingPlane_High=50000.0
DistanceHigh.fFarClippingPlane_Medium=10000.0
DistanceHigh.fFarClippingPlane_Low=6000.0

This changes the values of the in game settings slider for the high detail renderer. You can easily switch the view distance during play. 50000 is so far, that you can turn off the low detail renderer completely.

The performance is acceptable, as long as you turn FluidSync off. Still there are a lot of stutters, because the single-threaded engine is streaming all the data dynamically. A GTX 1080 / i-6700 @ 1920×1080 will be way above 45 fps most of the time.

The game is really a gem. To me it looks better than “Skyrim” because of its brilliant use of light and shadows and the fantastically designed open world.

So I can definitely recommend it, if you are not prone to simulator sickness!

[Author]

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