So close....

[thirstyfish]

I had a glimpse of awesomeness while doing some surface prospecting in my SRV. I understand that it was likely a graphical bug, but I loved the entire 1.5 seconds of it.

I had just shot a rock and was moving in to collect, when everything on the ground went pitch black. I turned my lights on, and I could see! But then the game went back to normal. For a tiny little bit, I had some true awesomeness on a beige planet. If anyone at FD reads this, make it so that what just happened to me isn't a weird bug, but rather the standard. Our ships and SRVs have lights, and I finally had a couple of seconds where they were needed. Don't shy away from this, go bathe in it. Just this one tiny thing will make a lot of planetary stuff a lot more fun.

I just wish I had the presence of mind to grab a screenshot, but I was too stunned to hit f12 at the time. If I have it happen again, I will try to grab a screenie.

 

[shreddog]

In before the "but your ship window has this special light enhancing blah blah, 3303 man..." guys shows up.

But yes. We need PITCH BLACK dark sides of planets(unless there is a reflective moon or something else very bright illuminating the surface).
Frontier said they're looking at improving the lighting, so who knows *crossing fingers*

 

[Cervantes01]

Yeah dude, the light amplification in your cabin failed briefly, and thus I rationalize a really bad design decision.

 

[Jack Schitt]

Try finding a couple of close-orbiting landable planets where one casts an eclipse upon the other, and land on the eclipsed planet. This works especially well if the galactic core is also hidden. Many of us have been saying for ages that this is how all dark-side landings should be, but instead we have the light amplification thing.

I do understand why FD made this decision: with Horizons there may be requirements for players to land on planetary bases that are in the dark, and they would have been inundated with complaints of "It's too dark!" or "It was high-G and I crashed my ship because I couldn't see the ground." Personally I think they should have weathered that particular storm and simulated something actually akin to space conditions in their space simulation game, but they went for ease over believability.

As shreddog said, someone will no doubt be along soon to explain how galactic ambient light is brighter than you think and the ship's visuals are amplifying it. All of which is reasonable, but not to the extent we see in game. In most cases, as soon as the lit side of a planet is out of view the dark side brightens to almost the same level as the lit side. It feels as though this may have been toned down a bit in recent updates, but if it has it's not by nearly enough IMO.

 

[Surprised Brony]

*sigh*

Just make it an option, FD. That way people who want to see can do so while those who want the wonder of a dark world can have it. All of this arguing over what's better, what's people want, etc is useless because it is all false. It's subjective.

 

[conceit]

In the very perfect little ED universe somewhere hidden in my mind, the canopy works as sunglasses and night vision as required (like by now). I have a button in the functions menu on the right to switch off either during flight. Also, a broken canopy would of course lack this function and so looking into a sun through broken glass would blind me (white screen). Awwww.

 

[Surprised Brony]

In the very perfect little ED universe somewhere hidden in my mind, the canopy works as sunglasses and night vision as required (like by now). I have a button in the functions menu on the right to switch off either during flight. Also, a broken canopy would of course lack this function and so looking into a sun through broken glass would blind me (white screen). Awwww.

Yep. We need that badly.

 

[Stealthie]

I had a similar thing at HIP 17403 the other night.

I went to pilfer a TS which are, as most people probably know, in the wreckage of a crashed ship, up against a small mountain in the bottom of a deep crater.

It was "sunset" (or dawn, I suppose) on A4A and the part of the crater where the mini-mountain is was in deep shadow while the other half was in bright sunlight.
As a result of this, I was flying into almost complete, murky, darkness even though I could look to the side and see bright sunlight.

It was actually quite embarrassing because I just flat-out could not find the mini-mountain in the bottom of the crater.
I was edging toward it, using nav' co-ordinates, a few metres off the ground, just using the ground-radar and spotlights to see where I was going.

And then somebody else showed up.
And, much to my surprise (and relief), he had exactly the same problem.
The pair of us were there, spotlights shining on the ground, sweeping the bottom of the crater, looking for a hint of the wreckage or the mountain it's up against.

I dunno how long a "day" is on HIP 17403 A4A but I'd really suggest a couple of the dev's go there at local sunset and try searching for the crashed Thargoid ship when the crater is in shadow to get an idea of what the game could be like if we had PROPER darkness.


If anything, this probably was too dark.
Thing is, if they got rid of the current attempt at HDR light-amplifying cockpit canopy, we could have proper darkness, as described above, but then you could hit a button and it would power-up a light-amplifying canopy function.
That could use a heap of power (and/or deplete your PDist, perhaps), though, so you wouldn't be able to do things like deploy weapons or scan stuff while it was in use.

 

[thirstyfish]

Try finding a couple of close-orbiting landable planets where one casts an eclipse upon the other, and land on the eclipsed planet. This works especially well if the galactic core is also hidden. Many of us have been saying for ages that this is how all dark-side landings should be, but instead we have the light amplification thing.

I do understand why FD made this decision: with Horizons there may be requirements for players to land on planetary bases that are in the dark, and they would have been inundated with complaints of "It's too dark!" or "It was high-G and I crashed my ship because I couldn't see the ground." Personally I think they should have weathered that particular storm and simulated something actually akin to space conditions in their space simulation game, but they went for ease over believability.

As shreddog said, someone will no doubt be along soon to explain how galactic ambient light is brighter than you think and the ship's visuals are amplifying it. All of which is reasonable, but not to the extent we see in game. In most cases, as soon as the lit side of a planet is out of view the dark side brightens to almost the same level as the lit side. It feels as though this may have been toned down a bit in recent updates, but if it has it's not by nearly enough IMO.

Too dark? can't land? I don't look outside to land on a planet surface, instruments all the way. That and our ships could use real landing lights, not the just the headlights we have now.

"Give me a stopwatch and a map, and I'll fly the Alps in a plane with no windows"

As far as starlight goes, get yourself into one of the truly dark places on Earth, away from all the light pollution caused by cities. Can't see anything around you, but you can see a ton of stars. Don't ditch the stars, ditch the light when in shadows.

 

[Schmack]

I turn my monitor off and use sound to find my way around the planet. It works. Its harder though when you're trying to travel 200LY.

 

[Schmack]

Too dark? can't land? I don't look outside to land on a planet surface, instruments all the way. That and our ships could use real landing lights, not the just the headlights we have now.

"Give me a stopwatch and a map, and I'll fly the Alps in a plane with no windows"

As far as starlight goes, get yourself into one of the truly dark places on Earth, away from all the light pollution caused by cities. Can't see anything around you, but you can see a ton of stars. Don't ditch the stars, ditch the light when in shadows.

Washington DC?

 

[Zebaoth]

our ships could use real landing lights, not the just the headlights we have now.

That's pretty much it.
Even the current headlights don't illuminate enough distance considering ship speed.
As of now taking the anacondas headlights as an example, they only illuminate stuff closer than what seems to be 300m at most.
That's ridiculously short for a ship going 300m/s+.

When mining you're almost ramming the asteroid with your ship before the headlights illuminate it.

Pitch black planets would be awesome though, no matter if they decide to change headlights or not, since you can still use your instruments to land.

 

[thirstyfish]

Washington DC?

Someone thinks he's clever.....

 

[CMDR Cosmic Spacehead]

I had this yesterday. It was awesome, but clearly a bug or GPU glitch.

I wish I'd had ReLive installed to capture it.
But as I came in on the "dark" side of the planet, it lit up, like it normally does, then just before I entered glide, several of the large terrain grids (like, 100s of km2) turned dark instantly, in a glitchy sort of way, leaving the rest light. When I landed, there was no light at all, except from my headlights.

It was great, except for the obvious glitchy way it did it. Lol

CMDR Cosmic Spacehead

 

[VR Jay Le Chardon]

I have no doubt the current lighting model is a glitchy placeholder to sort out darkside landings in horizons. I remember when I joined the game in horizons beta it was nigh on impossible to land on darkside planet bases as it was black as the earl of hells waistcoat. I honestly hope the lighting model gets improved, but I also hope we get some better navigational tools such as terrain following radar, serious lights - my car has better lights than any of my ships and it only does 25m/s because of poncey speed limits :-(

I fly in VR and the oculus rift CV1 really highlights the botches incorporated in pursuit of attaining the darkness of space / light of the core. I remember in an interview that David Braben stated he wasn't happy as the galactic core was too bright so they had to inject loads of dust into the galaxt to dim it down to more realistic levels. Sadly that dust is blotchy clouds in the CV1. What I think they need to do is tweak the value for the fall off in luminosity over distance:

is an image I've lifted from https://www.intl-lighttech.com/support/calculators/inverse-square-law-of-light-calculator

which explains the real world correlation of luminosity to distance. Looking at the void in elite it looks like they haven't implemented that in rendering the skybox, then have had to inject dust to fluff background luminosity, then tweak night time light levels and its a stack of fudges culminating in a comical botch. Start with sorting out the skybox PROPERLY and a lot of the rest will fall into place. Then for gameplay reasons give us infrared / light amplification / wireframe terrain overlay or something else on our canopies/remlocks. For the immersion purists we could assign a binding to this - like headlights - or have it enabled automatically ideal if you are short of buttons to bind to things?

I'm guessing the reason ships have such poor headlights is to prevent people using their headlights to blind opponents, ie for my least favourite B word - not illegitimate children but "BALANCE" - so I'm guessing 5 million lux headlights are never going to be a thing, but theres plenty of scope for infrared headlights and IR cameras. Wildlife programs use them today, so do certain mercs, where both systems put it on a separate screen, we pilots would need it as an overlay on our canopies/remlock visors.

 

[VR Jay Le Chardon]

Apart from awarding myself a facepalm for turning yet another forum thread into a real world engineering discussion, I'm replying to my own post to say I forgot to comment that the galactic core ie the visible milky way - looks like the current engine doesn't apply the aforementioned dimming due to distance, merely reduces the visible size of the stars. So the distance of a star in the skybox doesn't affect its luminosity - only the visible size of it.

 

[Crank Larson]

For a tiny little bit, I had some true awesomeness on a beige planet. If anyone at FD reads this, make it so that what just happened to me isn't a weird bug, but rather the standard. Our ships and SRVs have lights, and I finally had a couple of seconds where they were needed. Don't shy away from this, go bathe in it. Just this one tiny thing will make a lot of planetary stuff a lot more fun.

I completely agree. I remember in the very early days when I left my ship on a planet, and next time I logged in it had the planet had spun so that I was on the dark side. Low level flying when you can only see a short way in front of you is great fun. I want to do it again.

 

[BradHann]

I like how there are so many complaints that the dark side of planets isn't dark enough, but nobody seems to complain that they don't get blinded (literally) when staring directly into a star that's close enough to fill their entire monitor.

 

[Valethar]

I run into something similar on a fairly regular basis. As you're coming down in orbital cruise, glide and part of the fi8nal flight to land, the plant gets light and dark alternately. It's like someone is screwing around with a light switch or something.

It's really odd looking when you're on the light side, with the sun at your back, and the whole bloody thing goes black, like you're in the shadow of an eclipse, but you can still see the interior of the ship light up by the star.

 

[VR Jay Le Chardon]

I like how there are so many complaints that the dark side of planets isn't dark enough, but nobody seems to complain that they don't get blinded (literally) when staring directly into a star that's close enough to fill their entire monitor.

I think the lore behind that is fancy optics in the cockpit/canopy/helmets, such gameplay centric things could be implemented to alternative vision systems such as IR / Wireframe as I mentionin my previous posts.