Hey there. Here's a personal list of desired visual effects I'd love to see in the game at some point.
Temporal anti aliasing
There's no doubt that with things like the station interiors, ship geometry and orbital lines etc, comes a lot of jittering/aliasing/pixel crawling and even with the best possible settings it is still very much visible. And setting the in-game supersampling option to 2x is not really a viable alternative for most players, and is a very poor excuse for keeping the aliasing very much intact.
Elite Dangerous NEEDS temporal anti aliasing!
Depth of field
When dropping out of supercruise to land on planets, the first thing that comes apparent are the poor LODs. Having the highest possible quality settings makes it look better but only for a certain distance. Further away the LODs still look pretty awful if you ask me.
A simple depth of field effect could be used to 'mask' the issue so it isn't as apparent as it currently is. No need for stylish bokeh depth of field filters, just blur the distance low res LODs.
Motion blur
When driving around on the planetary surfaces, it becomes clear that the actual speed sensation doesn't really impress. Close-to-camera motion blur would change that.
Chromatic aberration on HUD
While CA isn't really fitting in modern games, there are certain aspects in Elite where chromatic aberration does actually fit, and that is with the HUD. The HUD is projected to the pilot as I understand it so a CA filter would be quite realistic.
Barrel distortion
Elite Dangerous features circular objects (true story lol) and those circular objects gets distorted due to how a 3d world gets projected on to a 2d viewport. Planets gets warped into egg liked objects and it's pushing away the immersion. It also gets worse for logical reasons when using aspect ratios wider than 16:9.
Barrel distortion corrects this by warping, or zooming, the centre area of the image without warping the sides.
An unfortunate side effect is that aliasing creeps even closer to the screen with barrel distortion....
All effects above should come with a toggle for on/off.
Star intensities
Up close, stars look quite good. At distance, not so much. In space there are no particles that would lessen the intensity of a star which means, even at greater distances, stars should be a lot stronger, or at least have stronger lens effects and light coronas.
Specular maps
Icy planets are my favourites, no doubt. But they lack that real icy look. More Specular effects and perhaps some slight glittering could make ice worlds even prettier!
Ambient lighting
The first gameplay demo had a superb looking asteroid belt. While the fog/mist looked phenomenal, the ambient lighting was even better. Today, we have a great looking fog, but the Ambient lighting we have makes things almost self-illuminated, which looks way worse than the demo's intensities.
Objects fade-in effect
There should be a fade-in effect when approaching planets so the transition between the low res base mesh and the rendered planet doesn't pop-up like it does today.
Thank you for your time!
Temporal anti aliasing
There's no doubt that with things like the station interiors, ship geometry and orbital lines etc, comes a lot of jittering/aliasing/pixel crawling and even with the best possible settings it is still very much visible. And setting the in-game supersampling option to 2x is not really a viable alternative for most players, and is a very poor excuse for keeping the aliasing very much intact.
Elite Dangerous NEEDS temporal anti aliasing!
Depth of field
When dropping out of supercruise to land on planets, the first thing that comes apparent are the poor LODs. Having the highest possible quality settings makes it look better but only for a certain distance. Further away the LODs still look pretty awful if you ask me.
A simple depth of field effect could be used to 'mask' the issue so it isn't as apparent as it currently is. No need for stylish bokeh depth of field filters, just blur the distance low res LODs.
Motion blur
When driving around on the planetary surfaces, it becomes clear that the actual speed sensation doesn't really impress. Close-to-camera motion blur would change that.
Chromatic aberration on HUD
While CA isn't really fitting in modern games, there are certain aspects in Elite where chromatic aberration does actually fit, and that is with the HUD. The HUD is projected to the pilot as I understand it so a CA filter would be quite realistic.
Barrel distortion
Elite Dangerous features circular objects (true story lol) and those circular objects gets distorted due to how a 3d world gets projected on to a 2d viewport. Planets gets warped into egg liked objects and it's pushing away the immersion. It also gets worse for logical reasons when using aspect ratios wider than 16:9.
Barrel distortion corrects this by warping, or zooming, the centre area of the image without warping the sides.
An unfortunate side effect is that aliasing creeps even closer to the screen with barrel distortion....
All effects above should come with a toggle for on/off.
Star intensities
Up close, stars look quite good. At distance, not so much. In space there are no particles that would lessen the intensity of a star which means, even at greater distances, stars should be a lot stronger, or at least have stronger lens effects and light coronas.
Specular maps
Icy planets are my favourites, no doubt. But they lack that real icy look. More Specular effects and perhaps some slight glittering could make ice worlds even prettier!
Ambient lighting
The first gameplay demo had a superb looking asteroid belt. While the fog/mist looked phenomenal, the ambient lighting was even better. Today, we have a great looking fog, but the Ambient lighting we have makes things almost self-illuminated, which looks way worse than the demo's intensities.
Objects fade-in effect
There should be a fade-in effect when approaching planets so the transition between the low res base mesh and the rendered planet doesn't pop-up like it does today.
Thank you for your time!