Broken Stellar Lighting

rootsrat

Volunteer Moderator
rootsrat
Erei said:
One of the screenshot I posted have a similar height above the horizon :
View attachment 298165
It is technically a sunset/sunrise. Yet no similar effect.
On that one it look really weird.
View attachment 298166
The horizon really feels like I Photoshopped the terrain under a different sky. There is no depth whatsoever.



I went a week exploring, not once I saw a similar effect than in the pre alpha footage.
Click to expand...
Well, depending on the planet size, that could be close to something like 9-10 AM.

It's been at least a month since I last played Elite, but I'm pretty sure I've seen similar effects to the OG screen.

I'd have to look on my Twitch or YouTube chanel, as I've been exploring a lot lately, but it's almost 2 am over here.

I might have a look tomorrow and see if I can find some nice sunsets or sunrises on the videos I've recorded.

(Again I'm not saying you're wrong, but at the same time I think you should attempt to find conditions even more similar to the OG screen)
 

nanite2000

nanite2000
rootsrat said:
Well, depending on the planet size, that could be close to something like 9-10 AM.

It's been at least a month since I last played Elite, but I'm pretty sure I've seen similar effects to the OG screen.

I'd have to look on my Twitch or YouTube chanel, as I've been exploring a lot lately, but it's almost 2 am over here.

I might have a look tomorrow and see if I can find some nice sunsets or sunrises on the videos I've recorded.

(Again I'm not saying you're wrong, but at the same time I think you should attempt to find conditions even more similar to the OG screen)
Click to expand...
All it would take is for one person to provide a screenshot that matches the one used in the Pre-Alpha and Alpha footage to prove that it does work.

For the record, no one has accomplished that yet.

Personally, I don't think it's possible because it requires star colour to be applied in addition to atmospheric colour/effects, and that hasn't worked since Odyssey launched.
 

Lyamecron

Lyamecron
Erei said:
I stumbled upon this official screenshot from pre EDO release. It's on the wiki.
View attachment 298155
This is my own screenshots, the first is a rather similar landscape, the other focus more on the sun effect in atmosphere :
View attachment 298156
View attachment 298157
The difference in how the local sun interact with the atmosphere is VERY different. Pre alpha, the sunlight feels like it's going through the atmo, while today, it feels like atmo is just a painted skybox with the sun in the middle of it. All the shader effect or whatever it's called are gone. The colored "haze" thing, the aura around the sun, ground lightning... It was all wonderfully natural and 3d. Now it's all 2d. A painted sky wrapped around the planet.

It's not that it look bad today, but the pre alpha looked so much better....

I imagine it was cut for performance reason ? Or perhaps something else.
Apparently, it was still there for pre alpha though.

I made an in depth analysis of Odyssey planet gen not too long after release, and I came to the conclusion we had a very nerfed version of it. I compared trailer planet and @Lyamecron "frozen" planet he posted on reddit during pre alpha. The thing we were shown in trailers/pre alpha were not of the same high quality we eventually had. Except in very rare cases.
Since then, it has greatly improved overall, and the time of melted ice cream planets is mostly gone (no complain !), but it's still relatively far from what was shown. I still wonder why. There is a clear reason for it, obviously, I don't suspect Fdev did it for fun, but I wonder why. Also, I wonder if it's truly gone, because I would have liked it.
Click to expand...
At the moment the terrain lacks a bit of depth. This could be due to the fact that dense fog is mostly absent in the distance. There is a lack of fog in general, just take a look at thargoid ground sites - totally different atmosphere from horizons. It all appears sterile, even though the individual components are amazing. There seems to be an issue with connecting them however.

As for your comparison between the two surfaces from pre-alpha and now - we have tinted lighting in atmospheres according to their compounds since update 9 I believe, HOWEVER the incoming light from the star is still pale white. I think it would look a lot better if the different spectral classes had an influence in atmoapheric coloring and ultimately how the surface is illuminated. Additionally the atmospheric color is currently only applied at sunrises/sets. As soon as the light hits from a steeper angle, we only get this white illumination on the surfaces.
 

MacIntoc

MacIntoc
I don't remember the planet, but from the shadow, we can estimate that the star was almost at noon, so the ambient light should not be caused by the atmosphere.

InvisibleRock4.jpg


InvisibleRock5.jpg


But the alpha was not close to the pre-alpha and in-game footage. Players notice quickly that the engine was good to render sunset and sunrise but pretty bad in the others situation.
 

Lyamecron

Lyamecron
I found an atmospheric world that orbits an L-class star at 8ls and oh boy the surface looks so pretty with atmospheric scattering as well as working stellar tinting.

kaEFJW5.jpg

s6Cxqqn.png


The water atmosphere makes for a slight blue hue and the red stellar lighting transforms it into this pink/purple mixture... it looks amazing
 

thistle

T
It's not broken as far as I can see, it's a different system and doesn't appear to include the colour grading added with Beyond. The colour grading some called garish, ironically enough.

edit - I really liked the colour grading and prefer it to pre Beyond and current EDO.
 

Kestrel1

Kestrel1
Damn. It's so disappointing that this new visual style is intentional. And it blows my mind that anyone thinks the Odyssey style is any better - like... what?!

Elite has never been the paragon of engaging gameplay. The atmosphere/vibe of the game was a huge aspect of what made it great. When I did exploration I'd frequently stop for 10 minutes and just take in the sights and sounds. Odyssey somehow completely lost that... sigh.
 

FutronBob

FutronBob
Kestrel1 said:
Damn. It's so disappointing that this new visual style is intentional. And it blows my mind that anyone thinks the Odyssey style is any better - like... what?!
Click to expand...
I'd like to see a source for that info, because there's absolutely no way that everything we're observing right now is intentional:


-Brown dwarf stars produce full system-wide tint like Beyond did (minus the odd skybox glow). It even interacts with atmospheres in said systems to create new color combinations.

-Most other stars' tint cuts off sharply around 15ls.

-Except that some star types continue to produce tinted effects in the shadows, but not in direct light. Sometimes this can only be seen on certain types of objects/materials, which makes it more challenging to test, but there's been some good examples throughout this thread.

-And let's not forget that stellar light tint is visible during a hyperspace jump, from dozens of lightyears away, for all star classes.



I've said it numerous times: No matter what way you look at it, stellar lighting just isn't working properly. You think tint is intentional? It's broken. You think mostly white light is intentional? Still broken.

We can argue about what we prefer all we want. But the reality is that it's all wildly inconsistent atm, and neither camp actually has a fully functioning lighting system. And while we can guess all we want, no one can definitively say what Fdev truly intended until they actually comment on it.
 

galahad2069

G
alexzk said:
1st of all it is simulator. So it should show results close to reality (calculated by current knowledge) and not what u think should look like.

Btw, Sun is mostly green in fact. Most energy is in green. That's why all plants are green - to reflect it otherwise it would burn. And for the same reason you can't see it as green, because eye has lowest sensitivity for it to avoid burn, and that's why you never see "green stars".
So what you think is not always correct.
Click to expand...
Actually, no. The human eye has the highest senstitivity for green, not the lowest.
1660765773006.png

The Physics of Light and Color - Human Vision and Color Perception | Olympus LS

The Physics of Light and Color - Human Vision and Color Perception
bit.ly bit.ly

If you have ever used a low power (5 mW) green laser pointer, you could probably clearly see the beam even in a well-lit room.
If you want to see a red (or blue) laser beam under the same conditions, you need a much more powerful laser, something like 50 to 100 mW. The beam of a 5 mW red laser pointer is hardly visible even in a pitch dark room.
 

galahad2069

G
Northpin said:
Star color tinting the environment should not be happening at too much ranges (however that should depend on the size of the star and intensity of the light emitted by the star)
Click to expand...
But why? The color (peak wavelength) of the light emitted by the star is not going to change with distance, only its intensity.
What should never happen is the starlight affecting the color of the skybox (distant stars, the Milky Way and nebulae), that's just a bad design in Horizons fdev introduced with one of their updates (luckily it's only happening in close proximity to the star since they "fixed" it). :)
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom