If you need gamma all the way up to tell... why does it matter?
Graphics improved?
- Thread starter Pville_Piper
- Start date
Well, it's the light of an entire galaxy, very close, reflecting off dust and gas... it's not just dark matter.
If the relatively dense interstellar medium in the galactic arms is only just barely visible while illuminated by thousands of stars in close proximity, then the much more rarefied medium at the edges of the galaxy, where only a handful of stars are, should be correspondingly dimmer. Dramatically dimmer than barely visible is functionally invisible and probably shouldn't be rendered.
There has to be a cut-off somewhere and I think it should be consistent.
I'm fine with being able to see more than a typical observer in an ideal terrestrial location would see, for a variety of reasons. Indeed, the game has always implied this. Only in the default StarInstanceCount do we see an area where significantly more would be seen in the real world than in the game (which is why I quadrupled that figure), outside of hard technical limits. Personally, I think an apparent magnitude 9.0 or even 10.0 would be a reasonable target limit for keen-eyed 31st century adventurers free from atmospheric constraints.
However, while I can only guess at the precise figure, the interstellar medium at the edge of the galaxy must be dramatically dimmer than this. In addition to stretching belief that even a transhuman with advanced personal optics could see it in real time (I liken it to trying to see light reflected off dry air while standing at the edge of a fog bank illuminated by a candle), there is probably not even a way to credibly represent it from a technical perspective. The eye adaptation stuff the game has now looks like crap when it only has to deal with a single order of magnitude of dynamic range.
Nothing wrong with my setup--that is an in-game high-res screenshot tool, my monitor is set up using Lagom using monitor controls, I don't change monitor settings in drivers. This is what the game gives me. There is absolutely no problems with black level in any other application.
The Legacy grey blotches is not what I see in the sky in real life, Live doesn't have noticeable grey blotches, ergo Live represents what I see in real life more truthfully than Legacy. That's all that matters, all that debate about how human eyes sees a single photon under special conditions or how Live crushes blacks a bit hiding detail that shouldn't be there in the first place is moot.
Do you like this image?
This in an emission nebula from about 15 Ly, covering a very large part of the skybox (captured in EDO, without any image enhancing mods by the way).
I guess you don't like it, since it's something that you would 100% not be able to see from up close with naked eye.
The surface brightness would be simply far too low in real life.
Maybe fdev will remove nebulae if we ask them nicely, since space should be black, right?
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Ozric
Volunteer Moderator
To be honest I never go that far into things. I normally just play games as the developers intended, unless something is stopping me play.
Any idea what's going on here? Taking off from a planet, so maybe it's "earthshine" or the equivalent? But it seems too uniform. Shouldn't the dark areas on the ship be as dark as the background space is?
Monitor settings have no bearing on what's in a screen shot. The Legacy client should not be producing scenes in deep space where the lowest illumination level of they skybox is (5,5,5), unless you're specifically seeking out the most brightly illuminated areas and zooming all the way in, or the is a reflection on the canopy of the ship from being near a star or something. In the bubble, I struggle to find any area of the sky that's outside the heart of a nebula, where the minimum luminance is not (0,0,0). There is a lot of the sky that's usually brighter than that, but your account of what you experience in Legacy is nearly as different from my experience in Legacy as Legacy and Odyssey are from each other.
I was pointing out that what you see from Earth may not be what everyone else sees from Earth, probably isn't what they'd see from space, and almost certainly isn't what our CMDRs are supposed to see from their ships/suits.
If your preference is to simulate what you see from Earth, that's fine. However, how Odyssey gets there is not fine. Your preferences could be satisfied, quite easily, with fewer side-effects, without the bugged stages of the Odyssey renderer that are incorrectly applying baking in a tone map and crushing blacks. Many other people's preferences cannot.
With Elite: Dangerous I'm never entirely sure what the developers intend.
However, I can certainly infer that they've always intended for us to be able to see things in this game that would be impossible for an unaided human to see in real life. That's been highly consistent across the game's entire run. Despite the impressive observations that were made before telescopes, human eyes aren't all that great as astronomical sensors (an John Cavil agrees!). There is little reason, even when targeting a high-degree of versimilitude, to be a stickler for those limitations in a far future setting that explicitly features all kinds of personal augmentation and other advancements.
I can also infer, with a high degree of confidence, that the current state of the Odyssey skybox is due to a bug that was never corrected. It takes work to draw that skybox from the galaxy map. So much so that we have presets that sacrifice a ton of quality with it to make sure lower end systems don't take minutes at a time to load a system during hyperspace jumps (one of the main things the jump animation conceals is the creation of the skybox for the next system), or run out of VRAM in the process. Drawing a ton of stuff (a lot of that skybox is very low brightness, cause space) just to invariably, unrecoverably, destroy it with a tone mapper later in the render is profoundly wasteful. The end result may have satisfied a developer's visual preference, but the fact that we have scenes where half the information is being rendered at a 40% performance reduction vs. the previous renderer version should have been a dead giveaway that something was profoundly wrong with how they got there and never should have passed the QA for the original release, let alone been allowed to continue through to this day.
When it comes right down to it, I've never cared much about developer intent, especially in titles like this. Interactive media sets the stage for players, it doesn't solely define their experience. I'll usually play single player titles with tight narratives more or less as intended, the first time, but that sort of thing never applies to open world or sandbox games; the setting is just the canvas here. I am a stickler for rules, if they are clearly defined, or can be unambiguously infered (both things that Elite: Dangerous generally lacks), that define a multiplayer game--we all have to be playing by the same rules for it to be equitable--but what's allowed and how we were envisioned to play do not need to be the same thing.
Mostly, though, in this context, I'm just fixing what little I can, to my own preferences, because waiting for Frontier to do something with it would be waiting too long. The game is more enjoyable if I take it upon myself to make adjustments, even if it's frustrating when some paths have been unintentionally closed off by sloppiness on Frontier's part.
The game uses image based lighting to allow illumination from the environment. So, yes, it's either the planet lighting up the ship, or the IBL for the rest of the skybox being too strong.
There are settings for this, though it's been a while since I checked their functionality.
Yet it does (or did, I don't have legacy installed anymore), in camera suite, a few thousand ly-s above the galactic plan, staring into the intergalactic void, games gamma setting set to default.
Most people who've described night sky use the phrase "black", "inky black" or some such, so I'd guess that's what most people see.
If anything seeing space from the space should result in even blacker black because the teeny-tiny amount of atmospheric scattering and glow present on Earth during night (especially summer nights in the higher latitudes) is not there. Though I doubt the human eye would really notice the difference.
That's just speculations. I'd wager that the abilities of a commander's eyes is not much higher than 21-st century baseline human. The lens is still the same size, after all.
Not arguing against this. The gray layer shouldn't be there in the first place. But maybe devs felt that getting rid of it by tonemapping and burying it under black level was faster and less likely to break something else, who knows? Might be it's a simple noise texture layer applied to the skybox and not calculated from the galaxy map; might be it is but they can't disable it without rewriting the code for galaxy map or even the stellar forge?
Realistically, yes. Realistically you shouldn't see many stars or much of anything not lit by the local star, either, because of all the lights in the cockpit. But nebulas and stars are pretty and seeing outside of your ship is useful so I welcome that gap in the realism, but that grey blotchiness is not pretty nor useful.
This does not align with my current or past experience. I really have to look for areas in Legacy to find ones where the black floor is not zero.
The same scattering that limits black depth also blocks a lot of light. Dimmer nebula, more of the Milky Way's halo, etc, can be seen from space.
That wasn't speculation; the game itself is pretty strong evidence in support of my prior statement.
Even purely stock Odyssey, or the darkest of past builds, clearly depicts stuff that would be well beyond the range of human vision. They didn't have to make these things as bright as they are, but they did. One way or another our CMDRs see their world in ways that would only be possible for their players through long duration exposures and false color.
Aperture size certainly matters, but there is way more to it than that.
If I were writing some speculative semi-hard sci-fi on the topic, there would be humans whose lenses have been removed entirely (it's almost entirely opaque to UV and not perfectly transparent to anything), plus genetic manipulation to augment rod density, foeval size, the bandwidth and shielding (more neurons, with thicker myelin sheaths) of the optical nerves, and grant an enlarged occipital lobe as the visual cortex is going to need to do a lot more work (most accommodation would need to be done in 'post-process' by the brain due to the removal of the eye's lens). Physically larger eyeballs, and/or the addition of a tapium lucidium behind the retina (plus a polarization filter of some sort to improve clarity), wouldn't be out of the question either. And that's just what I can think of of the top of my head...I'd wager a writing team that cared to take the time needed to know what they write could be fully justified in a hard sci-fi explanation that gave mostly outwardly normal people the same low light visual accuity as a healthy normal early 21st century human with a pair of good binolculars (plus the ability to see into UV to some meaningful degree).
It's also not a strech to assume, even in the game we have, that ship and helmet sensors are used to project an augmented view to our CMDR's canopies, visors, or eyes. However it's done, it is done, otherwise we'd have a pretty drab looking game.
I'm highly doubtful that the current state is intentional when just shifting the final tone map (which they do fairly frequently, right in GraphicsConfiguration.xml), or default gamma setting, could have been done more easily with similar effect. I can easily eliminate the excess skybox glow, in Legacy.
It's not related to LocalDustBrightness (I checked), but it's definitely derived from the galaxy map. It's perfectly reproducible and dependent on CMDR/ship location/perspective. It's even the same patterns between Legacy and Odyssey, it's just clipped in Odyssey, along with all skybox components below a certain brightness.
It's possible it's not easy to separate from other aspects of the galaxy map, but we do know that local dust clouds, nebula, stars, and the Milky Way are all independently tunable...almost the only thing left is this ambient dust. I can't say for certain, but it seems likely they could turn down it's brightness, or jack up the brightness of everything else, then apply a gamma offset...without having to globally black crush the entire skybox.
Agreed!
Bacteria looks more vibrant, imo and it appears to be more visible in the the SRV at long distance.