Starlight tints background skybox - Lighting issues

[Sterling MH]

I take proposed toggle and raise you a menu. Then I can have a galaxy that looks closer to this:



Mind you that's a rushed job that basically just hue-shifts and desaturates the current color system.

If that is what you did, all of these are available in the display properties of your monitor. Yes, even console scrub! What you may not be able to do is save it as a preset. Depends on what the TV allows. For PC players, easy to save on profile. And that is all you did there. One profile. Which, if it works (and if it doesn't, the actual answer is not simple either), can be saved and loaded before you play the game. Another small step. And some programs for handling print processing on monitors include a way to bind such profiles to an executable. Allowing print work to be done in an art program and digital work, requiring a different colour gamut mapping, done in another program, to use always the correct mappings.

FD don't need to do anything in the meantime. You can fix it yourself.

Or your image there isn't demonstrating a fix.

 

[da_wae]

That "local lighting" is pretty much nonexistent in the vacuum of space if you are not looking directly at the local star. Why would our brain "recalibrate its white balance" producing fake colours for the distant emissive sources if you are looking away from the local star?

Also, why is it necessary to simulate optical illusions like that in a game?
If some of the cockpit textures were something like a Hermann grid (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0a/HermannGrid.gif), should they paint dark blobs at the intersections or just leave it to the human brain to do its job?

By "Local lighting" I meant sources of light closer than a few thousand light-seconds, and it's not really non-existent when you're literally inside a stars corona.

The rest of your question seems rhetorical / philosophical.

 

[Sterling MH]

Do you need me to disprove this to you with LEDs in front of black cardboard?

Only one led is only one light source. So it's not the one you complain about: that is multiple light sources.

So try with several coloured LEDs shining on that card.

Looky! It's not the same colour as under a single LED!

 

[Sterling MH]

It's literally what the game calls 'realistic'.

The colour scheme now there is what the game calls realistic. You only accept what the game calls realistic when it agrees with your definition of it. You ignore it if it changes its mind while you do not.

 

[krautbernd]

What? The fact that it doesn't blind the character means our ship's canopy probably has some kind of filtering.
Edit: "how" that filtering would work is hard to predict, as would the side effects to the overall perception of the scene. We currently do not have working filters that work for being able to "stare outside your window while parked right next to a main-sequence star".

Pretty sure metallized quartz glass would do the trick. Still don't see how being blinded has anything to do with the color filter in-game or why we would 'perceive' a global tint without an atmosphere to scatter light. The light would only damage the retina where it is focused - that's how our vision works. The photons don't magically 'spill' over - the photons from the background are focused where you actually perceive them.

The rest of your diatribe has been addressed in previous replies, not going to repeat myself or what other people have contributed. You keep repeating the same
refuted points. What is this, arguing by attrition?

I'm curious how and where the galaxy map being realistic was refuted.

 

[VerticalBlank]

I have to say I strongly support the OP on this one.

 

[Red Rocket]

Has anyone noticed how the lighting changes has changed how normal objects like planets with ice rings look

Below is how normal ice rings looked before update

Ice Rings BEFORE update

Spoiler

Below is after update ice rings in full view of star at Ross 775

Ice Rings AFTER update

Spoiler

Notice how all color is also gone from planet. Why is the planet dark and in shadow in full view of the star.
if you drop into the station that orbits this Gas Giant it is blindingly bright from the star

 

[krautbernd]

Only one led is only one light source. So it's not the one you complain about: that is multiple light sources.

So try with several coloured LEDs shining on that card.

Looky! It's not the same colour as under a single LED!

Again, missing the point, but i'm not surprised. The galactic background isn't cardboard - it's the LED. The perceived color of the LEDs doesn't change as long as they aren't in front of each other. Is the galactic background in front of the star? Is the entire rest of the galaxy located directly behind the star?

 

[Old Duck]

Hi Old Duck, I'm not seeing your picture here.

Personally, I’d just like a global % slider to knock it back a few notches, and a toggle to disable it completely if it still doesn't work for me.

They’ve put quite a lot of work into creating the colour schemes for each star type and making the filters dynamic as the players move through the space, so I’m not sure how easy it would be to give us control over the nuances. Having a global variable that increases or decreases the overall magnitude by some percentage shouldn’t be difficult. As I said, I’d be surprised if it wasn’t already present under the hood.

I’m interested to hear your thinking though.

Here's a link to that image: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DuTQLtLWoAAOWd1.jpg

My personal preferences are as follows:

* Less color saturation, except in nebulas which I think could actually use more vibrant colors
* NO tinting of the skybox, except in the nebulas
* Turn down the blooming bloom!
* Fix the disappearing stars bug (which I believe is directly related to the new color system)
* Fix the transmissive hulls that causes our cockpits to flood with starlight (and our own ship's lights) from BEHIND (Dolphin is a perfect example).
* Reduce the visibility of galactic dust
* Make the galactic core look closer to this (below) than the brown, undefined smear it currently is.

Spoiler

Actually, let me just redirect you to this image search, as there are different versions of "realistic", but they are all way better than ED's chocolate galaxy.

Some of these things probably are just wishful thinking (and not what the OP is asking for). At the very least, it would be cool if we could change the hue or color balance of the galactic core, as ED's version is highly devoid of blue (click link for "evidence"). This would have to be an in-game setting, because us console players are limited post-processing outside of a game, nor should the hue of the core affect my ship, the neighborhood stars, etc.

Notice that I'm totally fine with red stars casting red light (ditto all colors) on everything inside the solar system (except other stars and light sources).

 

[Sterling MH]

Still don't see how being blinded has anything to do with the color filter

Because realism would be being blinded.

What does it not have something to do with the colour filter have to do with the current scheme being unrealistic, though?

 

[galahad2069]

By "Local lighting" I meant sources of light closer than a few thousand light-seconds, and it's not really non-existent when you're literally inside a stars corona.

Okay, let's say it's only 1 AU (about 500 Ls) from a Sun-like star. You're well outside the corona. The star is behind you. How would the colour of the local lighting make your brain produce optical illusions if that local light cannot even reach your retina (because there's vacuum all around, so there's nothing in front of you to reflect the local light back into your eyes)?

 

[da_wae]

Okay, let's say it's only 1 AU (about 500 Ls) from a Sun-like star. You're well outside the corona. The star is behind you. How would the colour of the local lighting make your brain produce optical illusions if that local light cannot even reach your retina (because there's vacuum all around, so there's nothing in front of you to reflect the local light back into your eyes)?

If you want to be completely realistic: considering the possibility of blocking the sun-like star behind you (if there's no close enough object like Luna to reflect light from), you'd experience a literal solar-eclipse-like situation (ie: not a lot of local light).

 

[Sterling MH]

Again, missing the point, but i'm not surprised. The galactic background isn't cardboard - it's the LED.

Then your demonstration does not do anything to prove your point. Since the LEDs are clearly coloured, and we're not looking at cardboard, it is not proving anything.

If the galactic background is the LED. Lets say a RED led. Full on. Max brightness. Never changes. Now put up a green LED and blue LED next to it and change those while keeping the RED (galaxy) the same colour intensity.

See how the colour seen changes when the lights are coincident with each other in the field of view?

HINT: put a flat red colour screen up on your monitor ("only red LEDs light up") and change the intensity of the green and blue. See the colour change.

But I know you were not going to get that.

 

[rhiz]

We and you have no idea whether it's easy. It presumes your guess is correct. May be. May not. I suspect it is a postprocessing, cf Nvidia's FSAA. It's *straightforward* to do. Doesn't necessarily mean simple.

After all, colouring the hud is simple, but they've not done it under user control. I have no idea why. Maybe the same reason here. May be something entirely different.

But how should it be changed? What bits will change it in ways that "work". If it's a colour gamma, that's normal for many games. If it's saturation, again, like colour. Maybe it's contrast. But if we need to have 12 sliders to set the features of this postprocessing, we'll have 12 slider with only the cognoscenti knowing what they're doing. And even then only maybe.

And that is where I think the "not simple" lies. If they fiddled with 12 curves to get the current colouration scheme, then handing that to the users is just asking for trouble, making that not simple.

But if the system is not "solvable" with the colour correction everyone has for their monitor, then it's not as simple as you profess it to be.

But if the "solution" for those who don't like it is to have the entire postprocessing turned off (and you would need to see what that looks like to make the call), THAT may be simple. What may not be simple is that it could re-beige every planet or make the shadows look like the Grue is invading your cockpit.

It’s more of an educated guess on my part - I’m developing a piece of experimental video/image processing software based on the same technologies. I’m 99.9% confident that these are 2D pixel shaders applied at the end of the rendering pipeline.

Constantly referring to the untreated image is an important part of the colour correction process, so I’d be surprised if the ability to switch it off at will wasn’t already coded.

I take your point regarding the HUD matrix – it probably seemed like a good idea at the time in terms of efficiency. One would hope that they would place more emphasis on flexibility at this stage – but yes, it’s possible that they’ve implemented it in an exotic and restrictive way. In my software, there’s numerous red buttons that allow the user to enable and disable each shader in the effect chain.

It wouldn’t "re-beige" every planet, since the existing improvements to planet textures were implemented at an earlier stage of the rendering pipeline (namely, as textures).

 

[da_wae]

Then your demonstration does not do anything to prove your point. Since the LEDs are clearly coloured, and we're not looking at cardboard, it is not proving anything.

If the galactic background is the LED. Lets say a RED led. Full on. Max brightness. Never changes. Now put up a green LED and blue LED next to it and change those while keeping the RED (galaxy) the same colour intensity.

See how the colour seen changes when the lights are coincident with each other in the field of view?

HINT: put a flat red colour screen up on your monitor ("only red LEDs light up") and change the intensity of the green and blue. See the colour change.

But I know you were not going to get that.

Don't overwhelm him. Color composition via multiple-colored-light-sources will fry his brain.

 

[Sterling MH]

If you want to be completely realistic: considering the possibility of blocking the sun-like star behind you (if there's no close enough object like Luna to reflect light from), you'd experience a literal solar-eclipse-like situation (ie: not a lot of local light).

Plus the complaint is that the multiple sources colour things.

You can also do this test on a clear day. Stand with your back to the sun. Look at the blue sky.

The interstellar medium is rarer than the interplanetary one. The aurorae happen because empty space still has a lot of cruft in it.

And, if you're lucky with low light pollution, you can see the sun's lights long after it is hidden from view. Google for pictures of "Zodiacal light" to see people lucky enough to see the sun illuminating "empty space".

 

[Sterling MH]

t wouldn’t "re-beige" every planet,

An assertion made out of ignorance.

 

[krautbernd]

Because realism would be being blinded.

What does it not have something to do with the colour filter have to do with the current scheme being unrealistic, though?

Still don't see how being blinded has anything to do with the color filter in-game or why we would 'perceive' a global tint without an atmosphere to scatter light. The light would only damage the retina where it is focused - that's how our vision works. The photons don't magically 'spill' over - the photons from the background are focused where you actually perceive them.

At least have the decency to quote me in full and not cherry pick what part of my question you answer. I'm trying to understand your reasoning that light form the foreground star would influence light from the galactic background that's not focused on the same area of the eye.

 

[rhiz]

An assertion made out of ignorance.

No, quite the opposite. You do understand that I'm only talking about the post-processing filters, right?

 

[Sterling MH]

The light would only damage the retina where it is focused

If our eyes don't focus, we don't see anything. That's how eyes work.

"or why we would 'perceive' a global tint without an atmosphere to scatter light."

You don't. Where it scatters there IS an atmosphere.

And most of the colouration IS NOT SCATTER. It's the result of a dispersed illumination in the forward field of view, therefore direct light, not scattered.