What is the rendering distance? Can other objects be seen as far out as 500 meters for example?

Not quite. While it’s true that rendering distance is really far, you will only see environment at that distance.

Actors (characters and tanks) can only be seen at 300 meters. This is for 2 reasons:

• Client performance / fps (since we have game of 60 players, seeing all of them would kill performance)
• Server performance / lag (if a player is more than 300 meters away from someone, information doesn’t need to be sent to him through network, which reduce lag)