This idea was brought up on the Better Cities thread and I felt that it should have its own.

Please note, I am NOT an expert, but have a tiny bit of knowledge on this through researching via Wikipedia. Therefore any suggestions/corrections are welcome.
Ray Casting: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_casting
Occlusion Culling:
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden_surface_determination

Ray Casting and Occlusion Planes are two different techniques that can be used to determine what the player/camera sees at any given time, and therefore has the potential of increasing performance by reducing the number of objects being rendered and held in memory.

In the previous discussion, it was discovered that there was an Occlusion Plane Oblivion game setting, but it apparently had no effect.

The purpose of this thread is to discuss the possible ideas and application of an OBSE plug-in that could use either of these techniques to improve overall performance and/or provide some other useful functionality.

Note 2: I don't have the skill required to actually create the plug-in. I'm just getting the topic started.

I'm wondering whether a variation of the ray casting technique could be used to alter the internal line of sight calculations. For instance, LOS is determine by everything having a visual range of 190 degrees. But what if you have a creature that has eyes on the side of its head, increasing its visual range to something like 280 degrees. Is it possible to use raycasting to override the default LOS formula?

If I correctly understand the difference of the two named techniques, Ray Casting would not require the placement of anything by individual mods to provide a "plane" or "shield" blocking more distant rendering, while Occlusion Planes would require placement of objects to work? In which case Ray Casting would be the more straightforward method to be attempted.