Since I've seen your updates about visual tweaks and sight cone, which I've always dreamed of for a whole year, I'm now confident that you'll take my 3 suggestions into consideration, they are about critical visual tweaks and mechanics that'd affect the game and immersion a lot.
This is very long.
1-Actual vision (Default On game mechanic with sandbox settings and not Client-Side choice):
Normally, things like cars are fully rendered as long as they're partially in vision even if a very big part of them is not, and will even update and move out of vision. But with a forced vision cone that works seperately from tiles, you will be able to see only certain and reasonable amounts of things, like half of a tile and quarter of a car!
•It may work like a seperate screen visual effect on top of actual tile-based rendering, but strictly not a cosmetic one and is an actual gameplay mechanic.
•Everything outside the view cone line will be viewed as their out of sight counterparts and unless you look there, unseen things will NEVER be updated even if the seen part is updated. Everything will be frozen at where you cannot see.
(You won't see a whole truck out of your vision just by looking at less than half of it. You won't see ANYTHING [Cars, players (optional), props, items, buildings, props, entities effects, even fire] updated out of your vision. A car that you see the half of it, might move, but even in that case, the unseen part where you remember half of a car will remain same there until checked)
2-Memory (Default On game mechanic with sandbox settings and not Client-Side choice):
A memory system that concerns the out of vision sight.
•You'll memorise everything visual out of your sight, including cars, even effects like fire too. Just everything, and everything I mentioned below apply for everything visual (not UI of course)
•You'll immediately start to increasingly memorise things (adding up to the total memorised time actually) the moment you look at them, never cooldowns. The longer you look at something, the longer time it will stack for you to remember when it's out of your sight. (Therefore taking half a second of glance will not make you memorise everywhere for a fixed long time) No serious limits except for humane limits, can extend to years if tested.
Different memorization speed multipliers from high to low: Terrain & Buildings, Props & Entities, Items & Effects.
•Everything that is memorised/seen/remembered will gradually start disappearing with decreasing opacity while out of sight, with very variable paces, a.k.a forgetting effect.
Slowest to fastest forgetting: Terrain & Buildings, Props & Entities, Items & Effects
•You will memorise things you see ONLY within your screen area, not your total vision cone.
(So you don't memorise things you don't actually see or look at)
•For the things that have changed, once you update (Look at) them, you'll start memorising them and all the previous outdated memorisation times for the unexistant things will be instantly completely lost. It will carefully work seperately for the tiles, buildings, props, items, effects and everything so same things can remain harmlessly remembered
•About when and how much the disappearing effect will happen… For a thing you've seen but not seen in a while, A / B (A = Remaining time before completely forgotten, B = Fixed value, total memorised time since stopped looking) equation.
A / B = The opacity level (Assuming it ranges from 0 to 1). Once you take a look at it, B value will inevitably change as it stops being fixed so A value resets back to %100 and you reset the time for it to start disappearing while memorisation time has only increased reasonably so it's not exploity, you'll still forget fast if you don't look much
NOTE: The defaults for how many base seconds of memorization will stack per second/miliseconds and the defaults for memorization speed multipliers can be tweaked to feel reasonable in a realistic manner. You can add memorising acceleration factor to things seen very frequently to make a realistic “hometown” and “home” experience, and make the spawned house memorised for a good amount of time
3-Visualized Sound Physics (Default On game mechanic with sandbox settings and not Client-Side choice):
Normally, you just hear sounds by your real ear in game and there's no reference for the loudness and range of sounds. Now this solution will save this forever, promising an incredibly immersive and functional game mechanic
•Visual effect of transparent but screen-distorting/warping radiating circle waves that are emmitted from the source of sound, completely seperated from sight system and will always be seen no matter what. It will not cause you to see the source of sound and make it visible when it's out of your sight, emission visual effect will render completely seperately.
The loudness and range of physical sounds will affect the intensity of visual sound effects and directly translate visually.
•It will visually emit from EVERYTHING that emits sound, even very silent steps or putting an item down. It can be tweaked to not bother screen and not cause distraction at low levels. However, loud sounds should definitely bother as in real life and have reasonably intense visual effects. All real values of a physical sound like loudness and range will visually be shown exactly and completely
NOTE: This will help to know how much sound something makes and actually make the “Keen Hearing” trait actually work like hearing rather than just adding vision.
