Horizons Has ‘beige-ificaiton’ been fixed in the latest update?

[zimms]

Sorry to interrupt your monologue, but lol, Eurogamer. They jump at every hint of "drama" in hopes of clicks.

 

[Mengy]

Only in the eyes of some beholders.

One of those beholders being Michael Brookes, the former executive producer of Elite Dangerous at Frontier Developments:

My apologies for not responding sooner, this issue has been on my list to chase up for a while. The reason for the difference being observed on the rocky worlds is the change to the new material system - in theory this is more accurate as it uses the chemical properties to determine the colour (obviously I'm simplifying a bit here!), however the problem is that those colours were based on Earth standard colouration for those materials, and most of those are beige/brown rather than the colours you might observe in the myriad of other possible conditions. We're currently working on a more flexible material system, and this will necessitate a fresh balance pass on these. That's not going to be in 2.3 though.

Michael

 

[rennarda]

I think a major problem in the lighting system is that the human eye compensates for lightning anyway. So even if you were on a world around a red star, your brain would still perceive white as white. The game engine turns everything orange-brown and us playing the game just see everything as orange-brown.

I think the amount of colour that comes from the star needs to be toned down, and everything made more white.

These worlds might actually be generated with quite a lot of variation in colour. But we're not seeing it because it's being illuminated by an orangey-red light most of the time (most stars are red or orange after all). It's as if the galaxy only has sodium street lighting...

 

[Lightspeed]

I think a major problem in the lighting system is that the human eye compensates for lightning anyway. So even if you were on a world around a red star, your brain would still perceive white as white. The game engine turns everything orange-brown and us playing the game just see everything as orange-brown.

I think the amount of colour that comes from the star needs to be toned down, and everything made more white.

These worlds might actually be generated with quite a lot of variation in colour. But we're not seeing it because it's being illuminated by an orangey-red light most of the time (most stars are red or orange after all). It's as if the galaxy only has sodium street lighting...

Intuitively, that would be the first culprit to look at. However, the ice planets appear to be largely unaffected by the issue: there is good color variation in those.

So it has to be the manner in which light is generated/reflected for the non-icy materials, rather than a white balance issue alone.