Starlight tints background skybox - Lighting issues
- Thread starter Valorin
- Start date
Sterling MH
Banned
The skybox was unreal to begin with
You can't see the nebulae ANYWHERE NEAR what the game shows. So it is already an augmented reality, showing unrealistic colours from emission regions that plain old do not give enough photons to excite the colour receptors of the human eye.
It therefore stands to reason that either you admit it is just a game, so what the heck, go with it, or you headcannon the idea that PF commanders have been bio-augmented for vastly better vision than humans get.
In either case, your complaints are about the aesthetic, not about realism.
Because if you want to go realism, the brightest nebulae would be a bare haze, almost uncoloured and incapable of lighting the most "large print" edition of a book to see even its outline under. And nonexistent if there's ANY cockpit light going on.
ISTR that there are profiles you can set in almost every control panel a graphics card and/or monitor gives where you can set up profiles for printing. In the event up until some in game gamma/HSV correction is made available, set up your monitor to a more suitable colour gamut and enable that before entering the game.
If you find one that fits, then pass it round, including to the dev team, who may be able to use it to determine what "most people want" for future reference.
You can't see the nebulae ANYWHERE NEAR what the game shows. So it is already an augmented reality, showing unrealistic colours from emission regions that plain old do not give enough photons to excite the colour receptors of the human eye.
It therefore stands to reason that either you admit it is just a game, so what the heck, go with it, or you headcannon the idea that PF commanders have been bio-augmented for vastly better vision than humans get.
In either case, your complaints are about the aesthetic, not about realism.
Because if you want to go realism, the brightest nebulae would be a bare haze, almost uncoloured and incapable of lighting the most "large print" edition of a book to see even its outline under. And nonexistent if there's ANY cockpit light going on.
ISTR that there are profiles you can set in almost every control panel a graphics card and/or monitor gives where you can set up profiles for printing. In the event up until some in game gamma/HSV correction is made available, set up your monitor to a more suitable colour gamut and enable that before entering the game.
If you find one that fits, then pass it round, including to the dev team, who may be able to use it to determine what "most people want" for future reference.
As has the missing stars bug (which makes me even more sad).....
https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php/465257-The-Stars-Are-Wrong
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Oh look, it's Mr. "i'm not good at social stuff so i don't need to explain my reasoning". And no, that's still not sarcasm. Keep trying.
As i've pointed out to you already, graphic artists aren't overly involved in fixing AI or the BGS. They do art. They do lighting. "Fixing" the skybox would be easy as implementing a toggle for it.
You can even try it yourself! Enter the galaxymap. Exit the galaxymap. Watch how the screen looks without the tint. Watch the screen getting tinted:
But hey, don't let facts get in the way of your lies.
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Yeah, i know right? Especially the first one.
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Can't really look at your screenshots without getting nauseated due to the diarrhea color scheme.
Not sure what lies you're talking about tho, Graphics engines tweaks are not made by the art team, but by the engineering team. At most the art team provides direction to the engineering team.
This seems like an engineering bug related to how the scene lighting affects the skybox (it shouldn't affect it much tbh). All an artist could do to fix this is annoy the crap out of the programmers.
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Apparently it's fine though and doesn't need to be changed, according to people who want more atmosphere (in space, get it?). I think they like the expressionist color scheme.
Yeah, sorry for springing at you like that. I just kind of doubt implementing a simple toggle would have a noticable drain on resources. It's not like AI and meta-issue are recent problems.
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I was talking about the default orange UI color scheme, but thanks for playing - I only used it in my previous screenshots to exemplify.
I'm also fairly certain that technically speaking, the changes would be a lot more involved than "adding a toggle". Even if you turn off the post-processing bit, they still made significant changes to the overall lighting system which would probably look even worse without the post-processing. All this would require supervision and implementation by at least 2 people if not more (1 artist / 1 engineer combo). Seems like a perfectly applied couple of resources.
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I'm not following the goalposts over there.
Or there.
Criticize whatever you like it won't bother me at all, I never get upset about video games or what other people think about them. If I disagree with you or think your arguments are comically bad I'll let you know, again.
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I don't see the point as long we can't seperately define UI colors. I like me enemies red and my allies green.
Graphics look perfectly fine to me without the tint, and overall lighting system isn't impacted by removing per-star colors as far as i can tell (which is probably the whole point of having a system that applies colors on top of global lighting). Again, i see no reason why this shouldn't be possible to implement or be an undue drain on resources, seeing how the system bugged anyway and needs to be fixed (as demonstrated by above screenshots).
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Usually I'd expect the programming team to provide tools for the art team to use, or as you say, at least work very closely together to establish the values. Also, it warrants repeating: these effects are being applied post rasterization as far as I can tell - so you either color everything including the skybox/HUD or you don't. It's not a bug, but a design decision.
The ability to reduce and easily switch the filters on and off is probably already built into the code as part of the development process - when you're color grading, you'll tend to want to refer to the original image quite frequently.
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Not all the graphics changes were made in post-processing. Even if you disabled the new post-processing effects, you'd be dealing with a rendered image that was made to be post-processed.
Wouldn't that kind of defeat the point of post-processing though? The new effects go on top of what's already in the game. Look at the screenshots i posted. In addition we're not talking about rolling back all changes. Just the color grading. It would probably be enough to lock it at a default value. Again, as far as i can tell the impact of making these optional would be minimal.
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Maybe, but not to the extent that it would drastically break the aesthetics as far as I can tell. To me, it feels more like an extra tool that they've added rather than something absolutely integral.
As I said, I'm pretty confident that the ability to reduce or disable the effect would have been added as part of the development process. It's difficult to know for sure, not being a fly on the wall.
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Absolutely true. And most of em were a huge improvement.
But they have little relevance, if any, to a discussion specifically about the tinting of the skybox from the local star color do they? Because that effect is ALL misapplied postprocessing.
ETA: and "an image designed to be post-processed" is flipping the workflow on its head. You don't render an image with post in mind. That's just not how it's done. If the post-process results in you having to go bavk and tweak something further up the render pipeline for the post-processed image to look right then you've done your post-processing wrong. And can turn in your image-geeks union card at the door.
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Yeah, being able to disable the post processing for debugging would def be useful. But they probably altered art assets already so they look good under the new post-processing. Having to maintain multiple sets of art assets to allow for disabling of post-processing seems like a waste.
I agree with you that the skybox tinting needs to be fixed.
However, when the engine includes the post-processing as an integral part of rendering, you very much prepare your assets for the way they will look after all the rendering is complete - including post-processing. Specifically textures and reflection maps.
A texture might look good in one type of post-processing but lose details with a different technique.
Or do you think games that use cell-shading don't prepare their assets for that? I know cell-shading is an extreme post-processing technique, but assets are very much made with their post-rasterization transformations in mind.
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