Longview

Longview is a mod for Minecraft 26.1 that fixes glitches such as Z-fighting and jaggies on far distances.

This is accomplished through two techniques:

1. By changing the Z coordinate limits from [-1,1] to [0,1] using the GL_ARB_CLIP_CONTROL extension (officially part of OpenGL 4.5)
2. By applying the reversed Z technique, where the far plane and the near plane are swapped in the renderer.

This ensures that the depth buffer will be evenly distributed no matter the distance, fixing all sorts of glitches that happens from a distance!

Compatibility

This mod is no longer needed in Minecraft 26.2+ since the game has implemented the same fixes that Longview implements! This mod will continue to work in Minecraft 26.1.

This mod requires a device supporting either the GL_ARB_CLIP_CONTROL extension or OpenGL 4.5 in order to apply Technique 1.

On devices that don’t support either, like ones running macOS, Technique 2 will still be applied, although since the Z coordinate limits will remain as [-1,1], flipping them will do nothing at all considering said limit is effectively symmetric.

As of Longview 1.3.0, this mod is compatible with Iris Shaders when using shader packs that support it. If the shader pack doesn’t support Longview, then this mod will disable itself temporarily, as shown in the F3 debug information.

This mod is fully compatible with custom graphics backends and will implement Technique 2 by default, although said custom backends are required to implement Technique 1 themselves.

Acknowledgements

• This Godot Engine blog post for introducing me to the reverse Z technique.
• Depth Precision Visualized: an excellent article covering the topic of depth precision as well as the reverse Z technique.
• The many people who have independently discovered and popularized this technique, including goddamn Quake developers.
• qendolin for putting together the farz-poc proof-of-concept and for starting discussions involving Mojang developers.
• IMS for he’s a jolly good fellow, which nobody can deny.