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An easy thing to check to determine if anything has actually been fixed, is to go inside the tunnel on Forest Colony and switch on night vision ("n" by default). If it's still super bright washed out green, night vision isn't working properly. It should be nice and clean and sharp and easy to see in there, because there's just very low ambient light which would be a location where night vision would excel.
Here is how it looked when the new night vision was introduced:
Here is how it looks today:
Slightly different location, but you can see it hasn't improved or changed a bit.
The same goes for the issue of snow being bright white on thermal, when it should be the opposite end of the gradient or spectrum from a hot item. If hot items are white, the snow should be closer to black or dark gray than it is to white, no?
Now if NV (and thermal/heat vision for that matter) are just color filters instead of actual vision modes, that might explain why it's challenging to have them reproduce more appropriate results, to get it to work properly... to implement it in a way that reflects how real night vision (and real thermal vision) works.
We already face this filter effect challenge on the maps, where different color filters are (over)used to help theme the maps, which is great, except those filters also cast weird color shifts on the mechs' camo because the filter is applied on the user's entire view, and not just on the ambient terrain and scaled to increase with distance (you know, like smog or other volumetric items are less apparent up close, but the further away you can see, the more the effect is visibile). (This is why, for one obvious example, the YLW's sunburst paint looks pink instead of red on Tourmaline.)
Alpine has one of the most natural, least-filtered looks, and River City not far behind, and the others vary from there, from Tourmaline's (and Caustic's) super-washed-out look, to Forest Colony's muddled darkness. In a way, the filters are a neat idea, but sometimes in practice it comes out a bit... weird.
The intent is good, both on the map filters and the vision mode filters, but the visual results have quite a ways to go to approach a level of quality and sophistication that reflect real environmental effects (increase over distance, doesn't affect how mech paint looks up close so much) and vision modes (consistent gradients and behavior/response to heat and light levels). They should not be flat filters that have an effect like the pilot putting on color-tinted glasses. They should be volumetric effects that are negligible up close and increase as one looks off further into the distance. The vision modes should similarly be able to produce proper gradients to where night vision in a dark environment is crisp and clear and clean and not blown out bright like it is currently, and thermal should properly render frozen terrain much colder than hot items.
Anyway, whatever the case, it would be great to hear an update on whether these vision modes are going to continue to be refined and when we might see better performance out of them.
Thanks.
Edited by jay35, 09 May 2013 - 08:55 PM.
