Overwhelming darkness at midnight

Please don't hate me. Notice my screenshots of the same area:

Evening: (with moonlight)


Midnight: (moon covered by clouds)


Late Night: (yuck)


I am able to run around this scene without the Light spell and see just fine. Really weird that I can see so well and others can't.

Bottom line:
Some can't see even with Light spell = that's a problem
Some don't even need Light spell = that's a problem
Many of us agree light spell not very useful either way = that's a problem

There is definitely some type of problem with light in game for the same software to render such varying results on different machines. Hopefully this is a helpful feedback thread for the dev's.

Edit: Relabeled middle picture to be more accurate. (Said 'without moonlight') Good catch @yarnevk

 

Wow, that's fascinating. What graphics card brand do you have? What OS? I'm on Windows 10 64-bit w/ an nVidia brand card. Same for my wife who also has this issue.

 

@Mishikal
OS: Windows 10 (10.0.0) 64bit
CPU: AMD FX(tm)-8350 Eight-Core Processor (8) System RAM: 32663
GPU: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 6GB GPU RAM: 6084

Same. Maybe it's my fancy 144Hz monitor that makes all the difference. Like I mentioned earlier, it's much harder to see on my other monitors. However we shouldn't have to buy new monitors to play the game. It's something they are going to have to fix in the software. This thread may help them do just that.

 

Previous Releases had a good lighting choice. Why is this being changed again? If someone wants to have lower lighting let them use the Brightness level bar under Video.

 

You just need to adjust your NVidea card. Right click on your desktop to bring up the Nvidea control panel. Select "display". Increase the brightness slider. All your problems are solved. I had the same complaint as you for quite awhile before one of the designers had a conversation with us in another thread. He suggested this solution. The only problem is that when you get out of the game, you may have to re-adjust. If you have Alienware, they have a program that will do this automatically for you as you change from game to game.

 

I view screen shots on MY monitor not YOUR monitor, so the screen shots are the best way to judge what is going on, and that is showing there is a huge variance ranging from blackout to daytime in these screenshots.

I am a certified video calibrator, so I should not have to be adjusting my calibration, the Nvidia I have produces properly calibrated video over the HDMI cable without adjustment, and so does the display I use. The devs are the ones that need to calibrate their monitors.

Note that it is possible to crush blacks on your own monitor, especially with HDMI because PC and video using different black standards, but that problem will not show up in a screenshot. Displaymate.com has patterns you can use to calibrate your monitors [EDIT scrap that they are no longer free samples, try this random link for black and white calibrations. http://glennmessersmith.com/images/adjust.htm ]

Garfunkel's look right to me although I would say the no moonlight case is a cloudy night covering a full moon , since the sky is grey rather than black it could not have been a dark moon. I would expect even darker for a starlight dark moon night.

Mishikal is nearly blackout, that makes no sense.

 

This has nothing to do with how the computer draws the screen. If it was, everyone that have super dark night-time would see the yellow/golden UI border as a dark orange colour... because, yes, even the GUI would be dark... and it would have to be REALLY dark to turn images like @Garfunkel Humperdinck 's into a total black pit of incompetence.

But it's not. The UI is as bright as ever. The game just renders BLACKNESS because the day/night cycle is out of whack and it doesn't render properly.

This is a SOFTWARE issue. This needs to be fixed and I'd appreciate if people would stop saying stuff like "oh just change your settings or whatever".

Please.

 

Definitely depends on the scene. I farm bandits and skeletons in random encounters and the night and the degree of darkness is acceptable. There are even times when the scene is brightly lit by the moon(s).

 

'Gamma' calibration does not change absolute black and absolute white level, it varies the dark grey levels and can easily convert night to day, so the UI being bright colors would render just fine. That would be my guess is the shaders are not behaving the same with gamma across different GPU, maybe an HDR shader gone wrong? If the test patterns do not show brightest whites and darkest blacks, then it would be monitor/card calibration.

 

In the scene I usually farm, at midnight, even with the light spell, and with the brightness on my monitor turned all the way up, I wouldn't even be able to see the tree to the left of you. Literally the only way I can play at midnight is to use Night Vision, which of course has its own issues. And again, this has only been a problem since r39.

Note: By Late Night the scene is as bright or even brighter than your Late Night shot.

 

So again, it's been stated, you don't turn up your monitor brightness, you turn up the brightness in your driver control panel... (I mean, I guess both couldn't hurt, if you're having a problem)

 

As has been noted repeatedly, that's not a valid answer. The problem is specific only to some scenes, and only at a specific period of night. It also does not affect other games, and it didn't affect SOTA prior to R39. The problem is caused by the game, period. One *could* adjust the card to work around this *bug* in the game, but that's not a good answer or solution to a game defect.

 

And I'm using a Mac. I don't have a driver control panel.

 

I was only addressing the person who had already adjusted the monitor brightness, etc, but not mentioned the graphics software itself.

 

Sorry I don't know how to adjust video settings in the software on a mac either

 

Turning up brightness will not help if the program is putting true black in those scenes. All you will be doing is turning the solid black into solid grey. The display or graphics card cannot resconstruct what is not there to begin with. The screen shots are clear evidence that it is not a monitor/GPU calibration issue.

 

Sorry I have been at GDC. This was an unintended side effect of our aborted switch to Unity 5.5. Will be fixed in next patch.

 

@DarkStarr
Thank you for taking the time to respond and for the relief you gave me by not saying it was intended.

 

@DarkStarr Thank you so much!

 

@DarkStarr , thanks for the info. I realy hope you get the unity 5.5 sorted out because not seeing the alpha channel as a white ... something through other objects and grass (not to mention the resulting white sheen) was SOOOOOOOOOOO nice while it lasted on QA.