An Idea for "realistic" brightness settings

[Noodle Thief]

I've played my far bit of TDM missions with gamma on 1 and brightness on 1 and I finally noticed how easy it would actually be able to see the player sneaking around in the dark if there was another player walking around as a guardr. So I finally decided to give the gamma and brightness guide in the training mission a fair amount of effort to get the "best" settings for an immersive experience.

 

After a couple minutes of re-reading the guide and fiddling around with the sliders I was never satisfied. When I was sitting in the corner to the right of the book I kept the darkest corners of the room and the torch in my FOV. When I got the dark corners dark enough to the point where I could barely make out the individual bricks (e.g. "realistic"/immersive), so that if I was a guard looking in that corner I wouldn't see shit if the player was sitting there if I'm just strolling by like most guards in the game, but the torch was incredibly dark or the colors were messed up.

 

So I was thinking, what if there was 2 sliders, one that basically made the "darks" darker and the "lights" lighter individually. I think that contrast basically does what I just said, but if you want to have near black corners e.g. "realistic" to the point where if a real person was walking by that hallway they wouldn't see you, the flaming torch is now going to give off just as much light as a zippo.

 

Anywho I don't even know if its possible to have a slider that just adjusts the dark areas of the game and another for the light. If anyone knows what I'm missing when trying to get the brightness right some help would be greatly appreciated.

[Epifire]

Part of this Noodle is how the mapper has setup the ambient darkness levels in their map. By default most mappers here will have this base, "darkness threshold" well within a comfortable spectrum for their play style. The problem is that some players like a darker ambient than what was decided to ship with the map. What you're talking about is something of a hard mix filter for the screen. I think it would be a great addition, but I'm not sure that can be harnessed with the current graphical methods in TDM. A more likely option would be the ability to override the ambient darkness values (since I think there's specific code to target that entity by name?) with a parameter that ensures values would be no brighter than x or darker than y.

 

I could be all wet about that, but I'm pretty sure that's the only method that could work effectively for user customization.

[nbohr1more]

I think this would be possible.

 

We'd have to let the renderer know if a light is an ambient_world light and bias the color vectors with a spawnarg.

The harder part being the former though I guess that's not far off from what Rebb did to distinguish ambient lights

from regular ones to ensure that all lights don't have to run the ambient shader (which I copied to allow cubemap based

lights).

 

The complication here is that the ambient_world affects the visibility of the player so you'd need to somehow automatically

change the lightgem offset in relation to the user customization.

 

A few interesting things to tackle but it's hard to say how much priority this would have. We have bigger fish to fry...

[jaxa]

This might be the way to solve this problem: http://forums.thedarkmod.com/topic/18585-nightvision-an-alternative-for-ambient-world/

[duzenko]

There is this console command

r_lightscale

Maybe try it and see if it does something useful for you

[Epifire]

A few interesting things to tackle but it's hard to say how much priority this would have. We have bigger fish to fry...

 

For sure. I was definitely seeing it as a 2.06 (if we can get to it) kinda feature.

 

 

This might be the way to solve this problem: http://forums.thedarkmod.com/topic/18585-nightvision-an-alternative-for-ambient-world/

 

Personally that's my favorite iteration and usage of the ambient world method. But I think that only applies to an FM you're building rather than adding that to the list of already complete FMs.