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The game still looks 'flat and washed out' in certain lighting.

Discussion in 'Release 54 Feedback Forum' started by Steevodeevo, Jun 26, 2018.

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  1. Steevodeevo

    Steevodeevo Avatar

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    Hi all,

    I've posted about this a couple of times before over a couple of years and I've seen seen some promising feedback from Devs during this time on the lighting, saturation, depth of field...etc, but despite this, a Unity upgrade and no doubt lots of work, at certain times of day, usually dawn or dusk as the light fades or increases to and from darkness, the game world looks very pastel shaded, flat and washed out. It's the same on the Overworld or in scenes, with some scenes worse than others. These images look slightly better than they actually did in game. check out the trees, ground cover, shadows (?) etc..

    [​IMG]
    and.....
    [​IMG]

    Its not easy to see in a 'flat forum image unfortunately, but I'm posting this again as the impact on perceived quality is quite dramatic. The difference in visual appeal (and quality?) of the images above when compared to the image below, for example, taken in a better light, is dramatic.
    [​IMG]
     
    Last edited: Jun 26, 2018
  2. Kabalyero Kidd

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    it may stay that way for a while... didn't they released their "art department"... :(
     
  3. Duffrey Blake

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    I hope not it’s a game changer for me.
     
  4. Gix

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    Yep. That's because most games do more than merely rotate a sun around the skybox and actually provide custom, artistic lighting. "fake lights" in a sense. It's a trick that's done even in indoor environments.

    For a sunset or dawn scene, you almost want to make the sun and moon stronger to increase the contrast and you want to keep the sun light for as long as possible.

    A cheap/sloppy way to do it would be to have, in a way, three suns. Your main one is in the centre (where you actually want the sun to be; what your sky will be following) that casts shadows while the other two are on each side... one set for dawn that fade in when the moon is about to be hidden and fades out when morning is fully set, the other for dusk that fade in when the sun is about to be hidden and fades out when the moon is fully visible.

    I've seen setups where the sun literally stops moving (but changes colour and intensity) at the edge of the horizon long enough for the moon to be fully visible... and have the sun accelerate its movement during night time to catch up to show up before the moon would set, stop moving and then, as morning passes, you have the sun move again at its normal/intended cycle.

    Light is the primary tool for us to distinguish shapes and fog/environment helps accentuate it.

    Mind you, it takes an artist with some solid technical knowhow to pull off naturally convincing transitions.
     
  5. Barugon

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    I think they finally have a reasonably decent transition now. What I can't stand, though, is the edge lighting/glare effect that's applied to the whole scene. It's way too overdone (at least on Linux) and I find it very distressing.
     
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  6. Gix

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    From what you describe, that sounds like “volumetric lighting” and they might’ve not completely tuned it right. Try turning it off in the game’s video settings and see if the scenes still bother you.
     
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  7. Barugon

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    It's definitely not volumetric lighting. This is something that was heavily increased beginning with R54 QA. I have a bug report for R55 QA here with a screenshot and a couple of videos (that still hasn't been looked at).
     
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  8. Gix

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    Oh, the fresnel reflections.

    The reason why it looks okay before the sudden "ugliness" is because the reflection map (aka: skybox) hasn't had the chance to load yet. Your footage during a night scene looks like it's loading a daytime skybox.

    That problem might be a tough one to rectify; especially if we want to increase visual fidelity. They could load in an interior skybox/cubemap whenever the player enters a building and swap it out with an outdoor one whenever the player steps outside... but that change is scene-wide... so items found inside buildings would look okay but, looking outside, the items outside would look weird... and vice-versa. Most games use nodes that contain appropriate reflection maps where objects in a scene would inherit from the node closest to them... but that usually require baking (ie: static) information for faster compuation and low memory usage. As far as I know, there's no easy/cheap way of doing it with dynamic objects.

    Alternatives involve removing reflections out of the material entirely; which is what you probably saw before R54. This is speculating, of course.

    That has less to do with the flat-looking transitions happening in the sky and more to do with how materials are being used in game.
     
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  9. Barugon

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    In the first video in the bug report, you can see that the skybox is already loaded. In fact, it's visible immediately.

    I think this is an effect intended to simulate sharp angle reflections and simply got bumped in R54 (it was present before that, just not as strong). I don't have an issue with the effect itself, just the level that it's applied at now.
     
  10. Floors

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    hey did your slider move one notch from "super furious" to just "plain old furious" ??!!! Glad to see it ! Heh.
     
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  11. Barugon

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    It moved from "quit" to just "furious'. :)
     
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  12. Gix

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    I don't know. To me, it just looks like the loading screen image hasn't completely disappeared yet.

    Since R54, yeah.
     
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  13. Floors

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    Is it just me or is the lighting seeming off in the QA build ? Maybe it's because I had anti-aliasing on.
     
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