I was under the impression that this was something they've been working on for quite some time? Indeed, wasn't the whole "beigefication" "crisis" down to the re-engineering of the lighting system that was underway at the time and presumably is what has now been delivered?
Must admit, I haven't fired it up yet. I did reinstall it when I saw OA's video on the new exploration mechanics with the intention to dive back in (on the Rift) but I've been struggling to drag myself away from X4 and Battletech for now.
To be clear, I'm only talking about the colour grading filters and there should be a clear distinction made between these and the lighting engine proper (in terms of the 3D scene, volumetric effects etc). Assuming that I'm correct, the former are just 2D filters working on pixels and as such they influence the entire image. They may be dynamic, but at the end of the day it's no different to colour grading in film. As I mentioned earlier, I work a lot with GLSL shaders and to me most of these problems are the result of over-zealous, exaggerated colour correction. You can do fairly sophisticated things like isolate and act on certain parts of the chroma/luma scale etc, as well as alter the filters in real-time with variables from the game (this is what is happening when you fly away from a star I imagine), but there's no way of isolating the skybox and HUD in a clean, infallible way when you apply these shaders at the final rendering stage, so it's a bit of a blunt instrument. Used subtly they can be very useful and computationally they're fairly cheap, but they've just ham-fisted it in my view. I like some of the results outside of the ship (although generally I think it's excessively used), but not enough to justify the ever changing HUD and the illogical colouring of the sky box.
