To change the world view distance you can change these parameters in Settings_Hardware.dat.
RenderingDistance_Horizontal = 8 Unit is 2x16 blocks horizontal
RenderingDistance_Vertical = 3 Unit is 2x64 blocks vertical
Setting them to high will cause the game to crash. The windows version is currently very limited since it only has access to 2G of memory. (Will be 3.5GB soon.) On the Linux 64 bit version you can do a lot more.