Syphel

Agreed. As I've been playing random gen and got to a city with skyscrapers, it goes from 120FPS down to 25FPS. It is quite extreme difference. So I had a chance to experiment with it. I went through all the settings from low or ultra quality and found that object quality which I believe is responsible for how far the objects get rendered. And that ups my performance greatly. So the less HQ objects to render, the more performance basically. So having something like occlusion seems like the obvious next step. I saw that in A22 diary they are adding this: "A new window tinting system makes window glass opaque until you get close." So I'm waiting a lot for this, if it manages to improve skyscraper performance. I do wonder, if they can add something like block occlusion which occludes all things behind blocks.

I'm under the impression that the game isn't struggling because of having indecent graphics cards, but because of CPU optimizations for such a huge scale game. For example, I'm running RTX 3090 Ti and at 1440p, my game runs at 100+ fps at max on average (including any big dips). While the GPU itself is being used at around 60%. It's kinda like having a massive mob farm in minecraft and once close to it and looking at it, you'll have your FPS consumed heavily compared to when being away from that. I see that it's gotten better over a number of alpha releases. You're right, implementation would be a huge player, but I bet they would make it a selectable option rather than going the Metro Exodus way.

No need for it, I love the fact that it's pitch darkness because torches and light sources become an actual important piece of gear and base setup.

Okay okay, wait, hear me out. FIRSTLY, I'm not saying we NEED ray tracing nor would it be a realistic thought to ever have it in the game. I'm not requesting it either. I'm making this question because I'm curious how difficult would be to implement such a feature into a voxel game like 7 days to die. Would ray tracing be even possible to add theoretically speaking? But it would be kinda interesting and suit the game in a way because of how important low ambient light environments are to the immersion. I have personally found myself completely blinded by the darkness when going to a building without a torch.