Dev log: making far-away stuff disappear… without the jump scare
Quick story from today’s build. When my character lifts off and leaves the planet, the colony looks great… until it doesn’t. As the ship climbs, buildings used to pop out of existence like someone flipped a light switch. It felt jarring, like the world blinked. Not the sci-fi drama I was going for.
I dug in and found the culprit: hard LOD cutoffs tied to distance.
Fine on foot, terrible at orbital speed.
The fix was simple in idea, fiddly in practice. Fade, don’t cut. Do it in the shader so it’s consistent.
What I changed: I wrote a custom shader with a distance-based fade. Near objects stay solid, far ones slide toward transparent using a smooth curve.
I used dithered transparency in the fragment stage, so depth testing behaves and the GPU stays calm. I also tied it to the day–night system, so things quietly darken at dusk.
Now, as the ship climbs, the colony softly drifts into the horizon instead of vanishing. Feels calmer, more cinematic, fewer “who turned off the world” moments.
What do you think?
How do you handle LOD transitions in your projects cuts, dithering, cross-fades, impostors, occlusion tricks?
Wishlist Distant Colony on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3340720/Distant_Colony/
