The low LOD distance for the mid-range terrain was getting on my nerves, so tried having a look into it.
Games config INI does have a "Terrain" setting inside, but any change to that just makes game reset it to 0 - was able to find a way to patch game to allow the setting to be increased, but that didn't seem to make any difference in the game.
Luckily I saw we have a TAA patch available on the main page, seems the function that patches is what handles setting up the games graphics values based on the INI settings, many thanks to the person who made it!
That function does seem to have a section that would set up the Terrain scaling value, but right now always sets it as 1.0, ignoring any INI setting, so that would explain why INI increase made no difference - fortunately that also means it should be simple to patch 😺
Tried patching it to 2.0, and with that the mid-range distance seemed a lot better - also tried 0.5 to make sure it was actually affecting it, and that did seem to decrease the distance a lot too.
As a test I also tried 4.0, that did seem to boost the distance a lot, but then sadly made the far distant terrain become all glitched out/corrupted, with parts turning purple too, not really playable...
Unfortunately, after seeing the kind of glitches 4.0 brought I tried 2.0 again, and sadly was able to see that far terrain was sometimes still getting glitched with that too ;_;
It's nowhere as bad as the glitches 4.0 had (eg. no purple corruption), but it was definitely same kind of glitching (stripes appearing on far terrain), fortunately that kind of glitching isn't too noticeable so I've kept it as 2.0 in my game, and only really been able to see that corruption at a single spot so far.
My guess for why the corruption happens is maybe game doesn't increase memory allocation for the terrain in line with that scaling value - with all the values I tested here the game always seemed to be using ~10.5GB of VRAM (on a 24GB card), nothing seemed to be increasing it...
Maybe if the code that allocated the terrain buffer was located the amount allocated for it could be increased, I don't really do much GPU programming though so not really sure how buffers like that are handled.
Anyway if anyone wants to try it out, you can edit the terrain scaling value by searching for
C7 42 44 00 00 80 3F
and change the last 4 bytes there to the float value you want, eg. for 2.0 scale set it to:
C7 42 44 00 00 00 40
(values are for the Steam version, hopefully Ubi ver might be the same though)
The increased LOD distance helps a lot to keep mid-range terrain from melting/popping in front of your eyes, much less distracting... IMO that's worth the small chance of distant terrain having minor glitches.