I’ve been waiting for the Visibility Volume for a long time and I’m very happy it’s finally been added (only in the public beta for now). But, the way it works right now makes its use cases really limited. It works great for hiding areas that are completely disconnected from the rest of your condo/map, but not much else.
It’d be great to see some additional settings added to make the volume more usable in other situations.
Suggested Additions
I wrote some notes to clarify why these additions would be helpful. You can click the “…” buttons to read those if you want.
- A “Visible Range” setting that allows the volume’s contents to unhide if you’re a specified distance away from the volume, rather than having the contents only appear the instant you enter the volume.[1]
- Persistent IO connections:
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- AlwaysCollect: Connected items are always collected, even if they are outside the volume.[2]
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- NeverCollect: Connected items are never collected, even if they are inside the volume.[3]
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- Invert: Connected items are hidden while inside the volume and visible while outside the volume.[4]
Visible Range: This would help a lot if you have a room dense with items that’s usually not occluded, so the items are usually all visible. For example, if you have a store fully stocked, you can have the volume envelop the interior, then increase Visible Range so that its contents appear when you’re nearby and not just the instant you step inside. ↩︎
AlwaysCollect: You could use this to force things like Timer Modules to get collected, which are normally ignored (I assume intentionally?). Otherwise it might just help if you have a weirdly shaped room and it’s difficult to envelop absolutely everything inside it in the volume. ↩︎
NeverCollect: This would be really helpful if you want some place to stay visible from afar, just with most of the detail hidden. For example, in a Ball Race map where most of the levels are made up of floating islands, I’d like to hide most of the detail from afar but keep the islands visible. To do that, I could just connect the islands to NeverCollect. ↩︎
Invert: This would be helpful for the store hypothetical mentioned in the note for the ‘Visible Range’ setting. You could use this to make a low LOD version of the store interior where, while the items on the shelves are hidden, they are replaced by a single large box that covers the shelves to make the store look less empty. ↩︎