PlaneShift
Gameplay => General Discussion => Topic started by: Xanthan on March 03, 2008, 11:58:24 pm
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Anyone else find it too dark in-game now? If not, I'm curious: have you tweaked your monitor or display settings to make things brighter?
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Anyone else find it too dark in-game now? If not, I'm curious: have you tweaked your monitor or display settings to make things brighter?
it does seem the the skys are darker to me also but that is usually during the night time and of course I am out of any of the cities and I end up roaming, stumbling around trying to find my way back only to become totally Lost
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Yes it is way too dark, and I do find myself turning up the monitor's brightness :P. It does make sense though, I mean there are few lights, so naturally, just like out in the woods or deserts, it does get very dark, especially without a view of the stars. However, having to turn up the brightness does cause it to lose its realism, so personally, I think a balance where it is visibly dark, but not pitch black is good. I think it used to be like that a couple of releases back, but I mainly noticed it after I bought a new graphic card.
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Yeah, I think it's a little too dark. I'm not 100% thrilled with having to have my monitor on max brightness, place it at an awkward angle, and perform a voodoo ritual just to see where my character is going! If it's so dark because a fix would take a ton of time for the devs, then I can live with it, but if they've opted for so little light because it makes it more realistic, this is definitely one place where I think playability needs to come first
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Some people have always had issues with the brightness on Planeshift. Me I think it doesn't get dark enough, especially at night :P
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Remember, the crystal does store energy during the day. So, it should never get pitch dark.
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It will be always too dark for some and there will be always someone who turn brightness up.
Night is dark, day is bright. Making a night bright enough so you can see everything clear enough is making a day out of night, it takes out of realism.
The only time i entered game lately, i entered some stone carved room and it hit me, that the walls was so bright, without any light source, yet it was middle of the night. the place was completly out of place.
I just want a movable light source and if there will be still people who turn their brightness up, its their business that they have to play in the middle fo a night, like it was a day.
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I'm not talking about day and night. I can live with night being dark. I'm more concerned about shadows being too dark to see anything in at 11am in Hydlaa, and 3pm being as dark as midnight in real life. I'm also worried about not being able to move in critical parts of the Death Realm.
Xarthen/Xanthan
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It will be always too dark for some and there will be always someone who turn brightness up.
It seems to me that it just depends on every player's screen. I'm using an old monitor for I actually have the same problem with brightness, I've long tweaked it up only because of Planeshift (which has been pretty annoying for me but oh well), but even with it higher than I'd like for other apps that is not enough to be able to distinguish a kikiri from a player in Hydlaa when they stand in the shadows or at night.
Hence why I have tweaked my plaza and jayose files' lighting since 0.20 (when the new lighting system was implemented).
I'll be hosting them for a while so everybody with the same problem can download them.
Here they are:
hydlaa_plaza.zip (http://www.cyanureill.net/mindseye/files/hydlaa_plaza.zip)
hydlaa_jayose.zip (http://www.cyanureill.net/mindseye/files/hydlaa_jayose.zip)
I haven't modified my Winch one since I consider it to be acceptable.. but if you have trouble with it I can do that and host it for along.
I have trouble with other areas as well but as not all of them use the same system for lighting I haven't been able to find out how to tweak those :p
Finding out how to brighten the magic shop up would be nice though.. I can't see a thing there even in the midday.
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i will give this a try thanks Noriin ;)
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Yes, I think it has become a tad dark in places like Hydlaa and the roads/wilderness.
I think it's fine for nighttime...much more realistic than the old lighting system. But at, say, 3PM it should be much brighter in these areas. Ojaveda seems fine, as does the BD region. They just need to brighten up the daylight and make the areas more consistent.
Volcanos must have erupted on the surface, blocking out the sun light. :D
And thanks for the files Noriin, I'll try them out.
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i just got this dark area is all about here..
pretty interesting ;D :ban:
otherwise its fine the most of the time..i relogged many times didnt fix, i shut down computer and start fresh and it was gone. anyways the screenies is here => http://dudu.110mb.com/shot07.jpg
for the ones who didnt have it..see how bad it looks :whistling:
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i just got this dark area is all about here..
pretty interesting ;D :ban:
otherwise its fine the most of the time..i relogged many times didnt fix, i shut down computer and start fresh and it was gone. anyways the screenies is here => http://dudu.110mb.com/shot07.jpg
for the ones who didnt have it..see how bad it looks :whistling:
I have gotten that about 25% of the time I play. Entire sections of the landscape go black, even during midday.
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Oh, so they are not supposed to be entirely black? Lol, wow, than I have serious issues here, its like that Every night, I thought that was the darkness we were talking about. It never gets any brighter at night than that pic there for me.
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Ok, that screenshot is extreme. never had that before. The only place I've gotten vaguely stumble at midnight is the road from the wood path to HYdlaa city with the big rock in it. But that was only the first time. So I don't really have much problem. Although I do see where people are comming from, it does get very dark at some points. Still i don;t mind it myself.
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for me the game was also too dark , seems like this is the only game where i have this problem , now every time i play planeshift i have to auto - adjust my monitor lightning and then it's almost ok to play without it being too dark
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This is completly unhelpfull. Its like saying every piece of map is too dark all the time. But then some people say its only shadows... stuff... Be precise. otherwise it sounds like complaining aka "do something!"
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Recommendations:
- for Nvidia: RivaTuner
- for Radeon: ATI Tray Tool
They are able to raise the gamma level to e.g. factor 1.7 - 2.0 while the game is running, and resets it afterwards.
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In order to be more specific, I stood in a random spot for 24 game hours and took screenshots at the start of each hour.
This is in ojaroad1.
Here's the lightest one, at noon:
(http://andrew.draskoy.net/planeshift/dark12pm.jpg) (http://andrew.draskoy.net/planeshift/dark12pm.jpg)
and the darkest, midnight:
(http://andrew.draskoy.net/planeshift/dark00am.jpg) (http://andrew.draskoy.net/planeshift/dark00am.jpg)
This is a montage of all 24. The common factor is that you can't really see anything on a calibrated monitor in more than a few of these screenshots.
(http://andrew.draskoy.net/planeshift/montage.jpg)
Here's why: A luminance chart for midnight:
(http://andrew.draskoy.net/planeshift/luminance_midnight.jpg)
and for noon:
(http://andrew.draskoy.net/planeshift/luminance_noon.jpg)
The graphs show the percentage of each image that is black (on the left) through to white (on the right).
No matter what your monitor is doing, the gamma settings, etc. these charts will show that the images are really really dark!
Personally, I think that outdoors at noon things should be a lot brighter. At midnight, they should perhaps be a little darker then they are in the noon shot. In practical terms, it means I can only see enough to play the game about 1/4 of the time. Yes, I could mess up my monitor or window manager settings every time I play the game, but *it shouldn't be necessary*. I do like planeshift a lot, but not enough to do that. Particularly as I do graphics work and need to keep everything calibrated.
So, Devs-- here is an appeal: Please make the default lighting a lot brighter!!!
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in contrast, I find the noon hour to be perfect on my monitor, and the midnight one is great too, although i can't see anything, but throw in a, dare I say it, torch, it would light it right up.
only problem is that torches/ spells that create movable light sources around the char as they move, aren't in game yet.
but if they were, i see no issues with the current settings the game uses, as if you travel to a remote part of the world, away from all the big city lights, and even the amount of lights in the country farm lands, midnight would look just as it does in game now, probably even darker.
I'd rather think it be better for the long run, that the devs work on adding movable light sources for night times and caves and what not, rather than changing all the maps for a quick fix in the interim, just to have them change it back when movable light sources are developed.
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Neko, I agree with your general sentiments. However, I wonder what your monitor/video settings are. Is your monitor calibrated? Do you have a gamma set to compensate for darkness? Given what the graphs show about the luminance of the images (i.e. they are very very dark) I don't see how anyone could be comfortable playing in that lighting without turning up the brightness, changing the contrast, gamma or whatever.
I too would like in-game light sources, adjustable brightness and contrast in the game, etc. However, I think fixing the light maps is a much easier thing to do, and I hope I've demonstrated that it really needs to be done.
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From those two pictures on my LCD monitor I would have no difficulty getting around at noon or midnight. My former CRT monitor needed to be set to 2.5 gamma to get around. Not only that but I had to twitch the monitor settings manually to bump up the brightness and contrast with the monitors on-screen display buttons. On my LCD it worked out of the box and all I had to do was reset the gamma to default.
The hill on the left is a little dark in either but I can clearly see the textures elsewhere in both.
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Xanthan: if you're referring to the midnight screen shot, I can't see much of anything but the basic outlines of char and distant make out of the terrain. the rest is pitch black, and for it being midnight, i believe that's exactly how it should be.
like i said, add in a movable light source and it's fine. I don't see why the devs should go through all the trouble of changing all the maps to be brighter, when along the lines the movable light sources are coded into the game, in which they'd have to go through all the trouble to change all the maps as to what they are now.
edit: the current monitor i'm using is the craptacular one you get for free when you buy a dell optiplex 280, as i'm at work, and work went with the cheapies to save money, as all i do is look at SQL code all day, so they don't believe being able to see pictures on screen reasonably well as a high priority to allow me to do my job. ;)
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yes I was referring to the noon/midnight pictures and can see the terrain textures quite clearly, much better at noon but still visible at midnight.
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Even with my monitors brightness set to lowest, and contrast set to highest, they all look fine to me....
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You all have different monitors.
Don't make the players mis-tune their monitors to enjoy the game - allow the game to get tuned instead... if possible.
Unfortunately, there are so many different graphic cards, different operating systems, ...
OpenGL is a nice cross-platform API. To some extent.
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How about making some torches available ?
Or something roughly equivalent to lamp posts ( ie. glowing moss or crystals in fixed locations )
Torches would look cool.... :thumbup:
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Now there's a good idea, but how about portable torches ones that we can carry about and light up.
Or...maybe a spell that would make the spell caster glow?
Personally i'm having quite interesting black areas in BD near the fortress which I can't do anything about, otherwise the lighting in Hydlaa is a little dark but ok - just glad we don't sustain damage from running into things!
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I would be very surprised if there was no "Light" glyph, and no simple spell to brighten your walking path.
It may just need to be implemented, by a) settings developers, b) effect designers, c) {maybe} engine devlopers...
But brightness from dynamic light sources is just one factor. Another factor may be brightness by level design.
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I can understand all the techinical aspects of whether or no the areas or whole game is too dark but to be fair I play on a MAcbook laptop and have no problems with lighting, except maybe in the dungeon or caves (but that is the whole point there), I also have not adjusted anything by way of brightness for my monitor or in the PS settings.
I find the lighting differences to be just fine
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Keep in mind that this darkness issue in the maps has to do with what os and what graphics card you have, and the devs are aware of the issues here. Making post after post on this issue will not get them to fix the issues any faster. They will be fixed when the fixes are ready for all to have. A lot of this issue is NOT in PS code but in CS, PS devs can not spend all their time fixing CS bugs as not all work on the CS project.