Space is not empty. There is a lot of dust.
Odyssey space has "too much contrast" - breaking down the rendering of a frame
- Thread starter CMDR Graphics Debugger
- Start date
I very much doubt any of that is true.
Great post , it shows exactly what is causing my main gripe right now.
I dont think there is a way to do this now but I wonder what this analysis would have looked like on the pre release alpha?
Also would your method of analysis here not form part of Fdevs pre release checking? ( QA ? )
I dont think there is a way to do this now but I wonder what this analysis would have looked like on the pre release alpha?
Also would your method of analysis here not form part of Fdevs pre release checking? ( QA ? )
This will never be fixed, and here's why: During the alpha, many people (including myself) already pointed out that the image was too dark and especially that the low range of the skybox was clipped to black. But then the forum's white knights showed up and claimed that this is what space looks like and we should accept it because it's "realistic".
Just like with the release vs. beta discussion, it's becoming increasingly clear that the white knight army is determined to ruin this game by shouting down all legitimate criticism.
Just like with the release vs. beta discussion, it's becoming increasingly clear that the white knight army is determined to ruin this game by shouting down all legitimate criticism.
Are you telling me that Holly was wrong about the black holes, and space?Actually its a popular mis conception that space is black , its not , its dark
I've posted this elsewhere and so has the person who took the picture but this shows that it's not just an artistic decision over how dark space should look, the fundamental lighting is wrong in the entire game and it's affecting everything.. Look at this pic of this SRV, it's supposed to be bright white.
O the irony: The original Elite and Frontier were masterpieces in optimisation, and @David Braben and Ian Bell went out of their way to squeeze every bit of performance out of the home computers of the day - and now look at this not even half baked mess of rendering they want to sell us as "release"...
Last edited:
I'll just add what I've said many times before on this forum - the relationships between different lightsources is completely random in Elite and does not even try to be realistic. When players say "Elite looks so realistic" it's actually translatable to "Elite looks so cinematic". Most of the time when you're looking at a planet, the stars wouldnt' be visible at all as the reflecting light from the surface would require the camera's shutter to be stepped down so much that they would just disappear out of sight. And no, you wouldn't be able to see any of those nebulas etc without boosting the image to ridicilous amounts (where your ship's menus would go so bright they would over-expose the entire image). I could go on but meh.
Space is dark. Like, stupid dark.
On our sky, there's a massive galaxy, our closest neighbour, Andromeda. It's bigger than the full moon.
How many times have you seen it with your bare eyes? O . O
Space is dark. Like, stupid dark.
On our sky, there's a massive galaxy, our closest neighbour, Andromeda. It's bigger than the full moon.
How many times have you seen it with your bare eyes? O . O
At that time, a PC was very expensive and players could not change it often.
Nowadays, albeit the semiconductors war that everyone seem to ignore, all game makers just keep raising the minimum running specs, hoping (and forcing) everyone wiil (to) just buy a new rig.
Yes it is. But you're missing the point. This is a game. This is supposed to be entertainment. This is supposed to be a piece of art to look at and enjoy.
Andromeda? Once, in a really clear and dark night. But part of the appeal of Elite Dangerous is, that you can enjoy these objects of vastly different lumnous magnitude composed into a common dynamic range.
… next!
Been thinking about this, could this incorrect handling of lighting be one of the reasons the game has issues with color banding even on calibrated screens with correct gamma?
Hmm… looking over the screenshots OP posted I see that the intermediaries are in a small precision floating point format (R11G11B10, i.e. 11 bits total for red and green and 10 for blue). These formats offer only 6 or 5 bits of precision for the mantissa. So while they're offering a large dynamic range (about 30dB)*, they have only poor resolution, namely only a quarter of the resolution you'd have with a plain 8 bits per channel integer format.
Here's a nice writeup of the precision issues of that format https://bartwronski.com/2017/04/02/small-float-formats-r11g11b10f-precision/
So yes, the choice of intermediary format is clearly to blame here. R11G11B10 is a weird format though and for this particular application the shared exponent format DXGI_FORMAT_R9G9B9E5_SHAREDEXP would have been the far more sensible choice. On the bright side: This choice of format is super easy to change in the source code: If best practices were followed it should be as easy as changing the value of a global configuration constant. Worst case they'd have to do a search and replace DXGI_FORMAT_R11G11B10_FLOAT→DXGI_FORMAT_R9G9B9E5_SHAREDEXP and that'd at least take care of the banding.
EDIT: DR increase. The exponent of a floating point value gives you extra dynamic range, on top of the range of the 30dB mantissa, namely pow(2, 5)·6dB = 192dB + 30dB. Yeah, me good math today
Last edited:
What does any of that have to do with interior spaces with artificial lighting being completely nonsensically lit?
Why are ceilings in a hangar more brightly lit than the walls or the floors, which have crushed shadows? How is the ship in that hangar in shadow and darker than its surroundings when there are overhead lights? Why is my cockpit too dark to see my feet when I have internal lighting everywhere?
Last edited: