Lighting effect is excessive on spells

While I understand the desire for spells to have a visually appealing effect, it is not only dangerous for people with some forms of epilepsy, but also gives me a bad headache. It's very hard on the eyes at times.


As I begin to cast my spell there are no issues (minus my sword being through my head) and the lighting is pretty good on the eyes despite it being sunrise.

This happened 1/2 a second later. just because it's a searing ray doesn't mean I want to feel like I'm staring into the sun. This lit up 60% of that entire building and about 90% of my field of view.

Now imagine going from dark poorly lit to this. Flashing light and dark nonstop. These spells turn the area around you to daylight for just a second. So the darker it is outside the more contrast there is.

I know you guys have heard me complain about epilepsy concerns for a long time (since kickstarter), but this is more than just a hazard to my partner's health. Anybody with a headache or similar can also be affected by this constant contrast.

At the very least we should be able to disable that aura of bright light that lights up the entire screen. It's not needed.

 

I reported this in very early releases. One of the guy came to my post and just wrote non-sense and the whole post was forgotten. I strongly suggest to put an option to lower light effects.

 

I guess that everyone has a different taste of visual effects. I for one like the effects..
But then again I do not have the contrasts so high as you on the screenshots.

 

That's nothing. There were other effects that were much worse. Healing Grace used to surround you with a bright white glow and you couldn't see anything else. Soothing Rain used to be so dense that you could see nothing but the rain unless you zoomed out, and now I sometimes have a hard time being sure that it's on.

 

There are many fine tunings for preference for sure, Both within ones own vid card settings, monitors, and of course Sota itself, I imagine the average user just plugs things in and let everything fly on default. Contrast, brightness and gamma found in both vid card and monitor. Never fear, there is a trick to the multitudes of adjustments one can make. Remember back in the day the colored bars you would see on the TV when stations weren't online and what not? Those are calibration images. You can find various calibration images in which you can adjust your monitor and vid settings on your desktop even with instructions as of how it should look. Then go to your Sota settings from there. Just using sota as a reference would likely skew the rest of your pc experience.
As for headaches, There are various options for this, including monitors that have a blue light filter installed, another option is PC glasses that help with this and in fact sharpen the image. Similar to Gunnar that can be found for a fraction of the cost. Accent lighting which is a nice usb powered LED strip you stick on around the borders of the backside of your monitor to reduce eye strain if you like a darker environment. Looking at the images above I'll add there is a fine line on the saturation adjustment in Sota between a more Cartoon or "realistic" look. I hope this helps, Enjoy your adventures in Britannia!

 

I think visual spell effects are too strong in most games. It creates an inflation to the sense of grandness when magical fireworks are constantly flying around, my mind tries to blank it out. SOTA is not the worst, but even here some "less is more" would make it more visually appealing to me.

 

I'm not sure I fully understand how your suggestion would improve the experience. Changing of saturation does not make the contrasting light any less hard on the eyes.
I will look into seeing if I can figure any of that out, but when black turns to white in a sudden flash of light, I'm not sure how much this could be remedied by any of that. Would you be able to be more specific as to where I can tone the light contrast down without making the game unplayably dark?

That is true. It's also a lazy form of game development, because it hides the flaws the developer didn't want to fix. Hard to fixate on any specific details when your eyes are not fully adjusted to the new light on the screen.

I reduced my brightness and that did not make any notable difference.

Is soothing rain that bad? The only times I have trouble seeing if it's enabled is when the other glaringly visual skills make it hard to tell. Without those there are lots of visual ques for it.

 

As I said, it used to be much worse visually. Now you can hardly see it up close. There was also a performance problem with it that took much effort to track down, and using it around a lot of people would quickly result in much agonizing.

 

I guess I did leave out the fact I only play sota running nightvision, day or night.

 

See, by contrast - even on the brightest settings, at nighttime it is "completely pitch black" outside my very small light radius. I've gone through various iterations of monitors and computers since playing Sota and this has always been the case. I think the light radius could use a brightness/radius boost, often I'm forced to use night vision just to not run into stuff. I have to use a 3rd party software to increase brightness if I want to be able to see what I'm doing at night, which makes my entire desktop/ui/web browser painfully bright by comparison.

 

by contrast, i find moonlight outdoors plenty, to the point that i put out campfires because they ruin my night vision (the real thing, not the spell). i've only got the brightness slider around one fifth, too. if you usually run with shadows, have you tried turning them off at night?

 

I play with the shadows off - for precisely this reason. As I say, its something that's been an issue for me for a long time, despite trying different monitors and, even with a completely new computer and different hardware setup I still find it very very dark even with the slider cranked to max (and my monitor's brightness cranked, too). I mostly have to turn on 'nameplates' and use those to figure out where the mobs are. If I exit shroud and open up any other game/application I have to turn my brightness back down to not burn my retinas.

This is what I see at "evening" (in game now) without the light spell for example...with max monitor brightness, max game brightness, no shadows.



If I'm not stood directly in the light of a 'light' I can barely even see myself - one reason why I choose to live in desert biome is at least I have contrast with the ground!


or on world map



I am completely open to the suggestion that this being "too dark" is a function of my eyes and not the game's fault - but I don't have this problem in other games.

I mean I can sort of see....it just makes me squint after a while


Sometime feels like anything outside my light spell radius may as well just not be there... a nd this is against the lighter colored, sandy ground.

In Elysium....(with light spell)


What's down there? Dunno. Follow the shiny blue water....

 

Hike your entire monitor into brightness levels previously only attributed to the unfiltered rays of the sun itself as it reaches climactic supernova. Then slap on a pair of raybans and you should be sorted. Keep spare additional sets of sunglasses for application to the affected area as neccessary (when casting spells), as demonstrated below.

 

The only way to fix this would be them to add a moon that glows the world at night a bit. And maybe add more torches along forest roads. Then again adding more torches (light sources) will hit performance on our client I guess..

 

@TheWanderingPoet
I think this is a case of pixel format option. Are u running RGB or YCbCr on your graphics card config?
Try changing the pixel format option to YCbCr 4:4:4.

 

they do. there's a moonglow that rises in the east just after full dark and sets just before it starts to get light. they have it set to do that whether the actual moon is in the sky or not, despite logic.

 

Ah ok, I never noticed that. Then they should increase its brightness a bit

 

@TheWanderingPoet
Did you check my up post about the pixel format?

NVIDIA:
Simply open the Nvidia Control Panel and navigate to ‘Display’ – ‘Adjust desktop color settings’. Select ‘YCbCr444’ from the ‘Digital color format’ dropdown.

AMD:
AMD Radeon Settings. Open this and click on ‘Display’ – the ‘Pixel Format’ can be changed to ‘YCbCr444’

If its already on YCbCr444, try setting it to Full RGB 4:4:4 or other settings, maybe it works the other way around for your Display monitor/TV.

After doing the changes you can do a basic test here:
Below are 20 grey squares on a black background. On an ideal monitor, all of them should be distinguishable, even the very dark first row of squares. Of course, the black background should be as dark as possible. The square labeled '255' is the brightest possible value, which can help to subjectively judge the contrast ratio. As with the gradient test, you might see noisy dithering (see below). For this test it is essential that the environment is dark and that the browser or image viewer is running in full-screen mode.

 

It seems to be a non-linear effect that completely crushes low-brightness into black. Simply turning up the brightness just washes out what you can see. It was worse when I tried it on Mac (something I haven't done in months), but it was worse on my particular MacBook Pro because there was something back then causing it to go extra dark in a way I could see happen in the loading screen. I wasn't sure until it stopped happening in some areas. It was probably something wrong with Unity; this game will surely do more than any other to get Unity up to snuff.

If you use a TV as a display (or a "cheaper" monitor display based on TV guts), the contrast setting will probably help most.

I have a hard time seeing anything less than #6 in your message, but that's because I have re-skinned my forum CSS to be mostly black-on-white, and the light gray around it washes out the test image. Opening it in a page by itself and hiding other apps, I can definitely see #2.

Also, my eyes are past the warranty date, so that probably has some effect. This is as much an accessibility issue as it is a monitor issue. The choice of colors for the forums on its own indicates a lack of understanding the importance of contrast.

 

Interestingly, I can see all the squares on your lcd test just fine, on either of my two monitors. I don't have issues with other games, either. Just Shroud of the Avatar. Maybe its cause my shroud is back and the darkness of my evil evil thieving soul permeates even the graphic settings.