Starlight tints background skybox - Lighting issues

People! A great day for scientific authenticity (did I spell that right?)!
It's an official issue now!


Please help by adding your vote and killing it with fire. Thanks.
Voted. However:
I wish the bug report had emphasized the skybox issue more prominently and left the ship interior lighting out of the discussion. These are separate issues which deserve their own investigations. It kinda feels like the skybox issue is being hijacked by the ship interior issue and I'll be super annoyed if only one part of this is addressed and then gets marked as "fixed"
 
There is a related issue with shaders making entire planets go into complete shadow just because your own ship goes into one - most notably as I passed behind a gas giant on my way to its moon, which was clearly in sunlight, but which turned pitch black as I myself passed through the penumbra - is this issue listed anywhere? I've seen it mentioned before but in a comment, like this. It may be unfixable?
 
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Voted. However:
I wish the bug report had emphasized the skybox issue more prominently and left the ship interior lighting out of the discussion. These are separate issues which deserve their own investigations. It kinda feels like the skybox issue is being hijacked by the ship interior issue and I'll be super annoyed if only one part of this is addressed and then gets marked as "fixed"

Technically they're the same issue though, aren't they? Namely, that the shader is being applied indiscriminately to everything. I hate to be a downer, but I suspect that the best that we can hope for is a toggle/slider.
 
Technically they're the same issue though, aren't they? Namely, that the shader is being applied indiscriminately to everything. I hate to be a downer, but I suspect that the best that we can hope for is a toggle/slider.

I suspect so too...

It would be great if there was a really good fix for it, but if there was just the ability to turn it off altogether / a slider / a switch to revert to 3.2 behaviour, I'd be happy.
 
Can you vote to not change it?

Because I like having backgrounds that are actually interesting.
You can't. And if you like fantasy backgrounds there are plenty of games which are not based on scientific stuff where you can have that. I wouldn't complain about tinted skyboxes if that would happen in No Man's Sky or other fantasy space games. Elite though always had a strong scientific side, like that galaxy simulation based on astronomical data the dev team seems to be quite proud of. And they are right. The tinting spills ink over some of the results of that simulation.

That said, I'd be happy with an option to toggle skybox tinting so anybody who can't appreciate Elite for that science part and wants to fly around in fantasy space can do that as well.
 
Technically they're the same issue though, aren't they? Namely, that the shader is being applied indiscriminately to everything. I hate to be a downer, but I suspect that the best that we can hope for is a toggle/slider.
I don't know. I suspect you're right. It's just that one of these complaints could be "addressed" by turning off the filter as soon as you pass through the mailslot, and that's not the complaint I care about.
 
There seems to be some misconceptions about what is actually going on here. There aren't any fancy shaders, and it isn't as simple as telling them to just not apply it to the background stars. The color distortions we are seeing are the result of a post processing full screen color grading effect. It can only affect the entire screen at once, and cannot be applied selectively to certain objects.

It's basically the same thing as Reshade, except this time it's built into the game and cannot be turned off.

An ideal solution would be for them to remove this effect, and replace the existing lighting systems with more modern system that can properly render more convincing lighting. I assume that they were trying to mimic the look of indirect lighting; for example, seeing the shadowed corners of your cockpit appear to have the light of the star reflected into them.

They could at least just work with the systems they already had though, and adjust the colors of lights and objects directly, without washing the entire screen out with a single color. I say this only because they now seem to rely on color grading to make stuff look right (which is a HUGE no no, in my opinion), especially in places like lagrange clouds. Would still look better than what they currently have, even if there would be no sense of indirect lighting.

However, I would be able to live with a simple toggle/slider as others have suggested. At least I could turn the crappy color grading effect off.
 
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There seems to be some misconceptions about what is actually going on here. There aren't any fancy shaders, and it isn't as simple as telling them to just not apply it to the background stars. The color distortions we are seeing are the result of a post processing full screen color grading effect. It can only affect the entire screen at once, and cannot be applied selectively to certain objects.

It's basically the same thing as Reshade, except this time it's built into the game and cannot be turned off.

An ideal solution would be for them to remove this effect, and replace the existing lighting systems with more modern systems that can render more convincing lighting. There's no other proper way to do it. However, I would be able to live with a simple toggle/slider as others have suggested.
Couldn't they apply some kind mask to the effect so it only affects "objects" and leaves the backdrop alone? I recognize that it's a "dumb" filter as opposed to a genuine lighting effect, but how difficult would it be to differentiate between the skybox and everything else?
 
Couldn't they apply some kind mask to the effect so it only affects "objects" and leaves the backdrop alone? I recognize that it's a "dumb" filter as opposed to a genuine lighting effect, but how difficult would it be to differentiate between the skybox and everything else?
There are certainly methods they could use to do this. Rendering the scene with multiple cameras, and only applying the effect to certain ones, for example.

I won't speak for the developers though. The Cobra engine could very well not be capable of doing this (or it may just be more work than it's worth). I do imagine that they would have done it like this in the first place if they could, too.

I'd sooner just see the color grading stripped out though. It is a fundamentally flawed idea for enhancing a scene's lighting.
 
There are certainly methods they could use to do this. Rendering the scene with multiple cameras, and only applying the effect to certain ones, for example.

I won't speak for the developers though. The Cobra engine could very well not be capable of doing this (or it may just be more work than it's worth). I do imagine that they would have done it like this in the first place if they could, too.

I'd sooner just see the color grading stripped out though. It is a fundamentally flawed idea for enhancing a scene's lighting.
I quite like the way it looks on planet surfaces, but, yeah.
 
I quite like the way it looks on planet surfaces, but, yeah.
The same colors on planet surfaces could be achieved by adjusting the light source of the star directly. It may lack the "filling in the cracks" look that color grading can provide, but at least it wouldn't ruin everything else in the scene...
 
The same colors on planet surfaces could be achieved by adjusting the light source of the star directly. It may lack the "filling in the cracks" look that color grading can provide, but at least it wouldn't ruin everything else in the scene...
Hey works for me.
 
Couldn't they apply some kind mask to the effect so it only affects "objects" and leaves the backdrop alone? I recognize that it's a "dumb" filter as opposed to a genuine lighting effect, but how difficult would it be to differentiate between the skybox and everything else?

The issue is that, by the looks of it, this is a post-rasterization shader applied once the 3D scene is rendered as a 2D image, so it's only working with pixels rather than geometry data. It's comparable to grabbing a screenshot from the game and added effects in photoshop, only on a frame per frame basis. It's more powerful and dynamic because it can be manipulated with variables from the game in real-time, but there remains that fundamental limitation. I write GLSL shaders for video and image processing for my work, so I'm not experienced with their use in a game engine, but that's what it looks like to me. Others have suggested that it might be possible to define layers and only apply certain shaders to those - this is already the case to an extent because the main menu (where you choose to exit the game), is not affected - but I very much doubt that it would yield satisfactory results and probably defeats the purpose of using post-processing in the first place - which is a fairly simple and computationally efficient way of adding dramatic effects to the final output.
 
It would be great if there was a really good fix for it, but if there was just the ability to turn it off altogether / a slider / a switch to revert to 3.2 behaviour, I'd be happy.
When Star Trek Online added their new lighting model, shadows went all over the damn place, and the game became unplayable with the new lighting on for many players, without pushing their gamma up to max and washing everything out.
They left in a simple toggle on/off switch in the menu so that players could choose the lighting model they preferred. Everyone was happy (Well, except people who like the day/night cycles on certain worlds, which were removed outright in order to support the new lighting model)
 
There is a related issue with shaders making entire planets go into complete shadow just because your own ship goes into one - most notably as I passed behind a gas giant on my way to its moon, which was clearly in sunlight, but which turned pitch black as I myself passed through the penumbra - is this issue listed anywhere? I've seen it mentioned before but in a comment, like this. It may be unfixable?

I’ve seen this same problem on Xbox. It’s really annoying and makes it hard to explore far-out planets at times. I’d like to see more galactic ambient light effects on these worlds as well.

-CMDR Ex
 
There have been some small but very welcomed fixes/changes to exploration that make me really happy.
I'm currently on the way from SagA* to Beagle.

- Skybox doesn't "break" anymore, meaning no disappearing stars after jumps until now. There are still cubes of stars etc, as that is apparently a side-effect of the galactic forge in ED, but there is no "skybox not showing up bug until you restart the game" anymore.

- Skybox and milky way look better and crisper to me compare to the April patch. Everything seems brighter, dark side of planets too, passive lightning of dark sides from the skybox seems to be back IMO.

Source: https://i.imgur.com/Vj8uQVn.jpg


- Color tinting of the skybox next to stars has been removed (L-Type stars and darker) or toned down majorly (still visible with M-Type stars though, for example).
(no red/purple color tint of the galaxy from the red dwarf)
Source: https://i.imgur.com/TGsJrwb.jpg


- Black holes don't discolor surrounding nebulas anymore (green? color tint gone)
Source: https://i.imgur.com/PwX1d4y.jpg


- FSS seems a lot smother for me, but the scanning of geological locations is still slow and lags the FSS (at 60 FPS).


What's your experience with the September patch?
Happy Xploring
 
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