TheUncle is bang on correct on a number of things, and actually many of those points are being actively worked on this week. I’d like to remind everyone that as much as the programming features are “beta”, so too has been the art as we learn, iterate, and implement more of the power of CryEngine into our game every day. A huge focus, basically since the beginning of open beta, has been to get a handle on performance, so there hasn’t been as much forward movement to straight-up visual improvements as there could have been, but I definitely disagree with the title of this thread, and would say that this game is pretty amazing looking already. There is a limit to fidelity when you are dealing with maps with 1.5km + sight lines, and trying to make a game run decently for as many people as possible, but overall I do believe we have a great looking game and I never have trouble finding locations to take a screenshot that I can be proud of. As I type this, I often catch myself staring at the forum background and all the details in the Mech and environment. However, let me speak to some of TheUncle’s points here, because they are all valid, and we always do have a lot of room for improvement:
Re: Building Window Cubemaps – We agree that we’d like to see the windows a bit more reflective. I did crank these recently in river city (during its performance pass in Dec of last year), but I've been hoping to find some time to increase the fresnel power slightly on many of the windows (which will show the cubemap even more). Some of the cubemaps aren’t overly dynamic looking so maybe a positional change for some of the probes could help with this (you’ll note his cubemap image has quite a bit of a dynamic change between building and sky colors – something we won’t be able to easily achieve with brown buildings and brown skys
), but finding high dynamic locations for the environment probes will go a long way. I have been hoping to find a chance to look into this in the near future, and maybe will have time when doing the hdrEyeAdaptation relights in the next week or two (read further for news on that!).
In frozen city, the windows use the “frozen” shader which doesn’t allow me to crank the gloss and Fresnel settings in a way that shows off the cubemaps too strongly, although we decided that was okay because they are frozen over with inches of ice and snow anyway.
Re: Mechs having cubemaps already in the material – Yes, we do this, but only because it adds itself onto the environment cubemap, allowing us to maintain at least a minimum reflectiveness in low light / low environment probe areas. Two days ago Gabe (the lead mech texture artist) and I did a pass across every single Mech material in the game that will almost double the amount of reflectiveness achieved in the cubemaps on the Mechs in all environments. We’re going to submit that change on Monday (we didn’t want it to sneak in last second to this latest integration this week, as it needs to be timed up with some changes in in the Mech Lab), so if all goes well that will be an addition to the March 18th patch.
Re: Global Illumination – This is something we’ve wanted to crank the distance of since Day 1 but it kept getting bumped down the priority list. We passed the distance increase settings along to the programmers to implement a few weeks ago but they wanted to double check that the performance wasn’t negatively impacted by increasing the distance (although the documentation says that it won’t be (less precision over greater distances)). We can hope that this will trickle in sometime in the next patch or two, if I remind the programmer about it right now (which I will).
Re: Light shadows in Frozen and Forest Colony – This was a lighting decision on forest colony (it's supposed to be quite overcast feeling and therefore it wouldn’t have very strong shadows), although I did relight forest colony earlier this week to re-achieve the brighter overcast feel, make the fog a more natural color, and increase the max distance for the Depth of Field (3.5 km instead of 2km, making it "less blurry") -- coming either this next patch or the one after.
For Frozen City, it was both a lighting feel that the directors wanted to achieve (not very dark shadows, because of lots of bounce and reflection on snow and the storm), and also we needed to have the ambient brightness incredibly high in order to try and make the Mechs anything but pitch black in comparison to all of the bright snow and “frozen shader” buildings.
Re: HDR Eye Adaptation – This is a very timely post because I spent the entirety of yesterday on this specific issue. We now know our specific release of Cryengine had some funky settings for the default eyeAdaptation numbers (they were likely half way through tuning it themselves at the time of our cryengine build). Sadly, we didn’t know this and have lit all the levels as best we could while unknowingly fighting those numbers. Yesterday I worked out some numbers that will make our eyeAdaptation in our levels work as intended, and caught a bug that we unknowingly introduced that makes the recovery incredibly slow. The eyeadaptation speed will now be 12.5 times faster to recover after a giant glowing ball of fire erupts in your face (almost immediate now, when it would take many seconds before).
Unfortunately changing the default eyeAdaptationBase and eyeAdaptationFactor numbers will require a small re-light to every level (I was able to re-do Alpine and Forest yesterday), so it will take some time to actually implement it. I am working mainly on getting Desert up for integration at the end of next week, so I
hope (but can’t promise) to find the time to tweak the other levels next week in order to apply this fix for the March 18th patch (this could easily slip to the next one 2 weeks after that).
Re: River City Night Lighting - There has been a ton of forum feedback on this particular map, and I think the people who are of the opinion that “it is a mess” are in the majority -although many people “love the map!” too, so I’ll have to be careful when changing anything to maintain the feel that the directors and the lighting artist on this map were going for. I don’t personally know the numbers because I didn’t do this one, but I would initially agree that the sky horizon brightness doesn’t properly match the ambient brightness within the level, so when I am running through all the maps to do the eyeAdaptation brightness relights I’ll definitely take some time to see what I can do to River City Night to make everyone as happy as possible.
Re: Vision Modes – This is something I sat down with Matt Craig about last night, and we discussed current issues and future plans for the vision modes in the game. We both agree that the current settings for night vision are not ideal and will be tweaked sooner rather than later. We don’t want night vision to make anyone’s eyes explode when they are playing late at night. We want it to be very affective in night levels (but not required, OP, or used 100% of the time by everyone), and very ineffective in extremely bright levels.
On the thermal side, we are definitely noticing that it is the view mode of choice, for its power in outlining the Mechs in any environment at any range. This is something that we’ll want to tune as well, in addition to making it “look better”, we want it to be used by players in situations designed for it. For example, we’d like it to still be the most affective view during a storm cycle in Frozen City, but if you pop into a hot map like Desert, or even a warm map like caustic, it should be much less affective.
I don’t think I forgot anything big that he talked about, but this is already a novel and I am sure after reading this most of you hope that I will actually just get back to work on Desert and all of these issues (+more!) rather than typing any more. So… BYE!
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