[Suggestion] Please Make Night Darker

If I make my monitor darker and nobody else does, I'm just handicapping myself for a rather poor visual effect. Darker night MUST be forced on everybody or not at all.

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Confirmed you don't have a clue how badly this would end up. Time for today's lesson:

This is how ArmA II renders nights with only star light at 250% gamma, max brightness.


This is how the game looks with a waning moon under the same settings.


With this shading, it's either all or nothing. The slightest amount of ambient light needed to make shapes beyond the silhouette of the horizon visible makes EVERYTHING visible with increased gamma. You want to fumble around in the dark? Go right ahead, but you'll have to find another game to do it in. A company stupid enough to do this to a F2P game that can't use the milsim excuse aren't going to have active servers for long. At best, you'll end up getting image #2, so I wouldn't go convincing myself that anything other than bright nighttime is in store for PS2.

Aaand you proved exactly what I posted way back in post number 2. Black bloom or noise would prevent that second image from being viable. I can get that you don't grasp that, otherwise you wouldn't have posted them with your argument being what it is.

With black bloom, that second image would have a pitch black shadow of the player and an extremely blurry grassland and trees. You'd see the clouds clearly, that slightly lighter patch of dirt in the bottom right corner of the screen, a fuzzy white streak for the road and blotches for those hay bales. The smaller trees alongside the road might be visible as dark blotches, but you might think they were rocks or features of the terrain. Turning up the gamma/contrast/brightness wouldn't clarify the picture, and if it's done right, it wouldn't even be that near black; it would just be dark and unclear. The sky would have to be treated specially otherwise stars wouldn't be visible.

With noise, the effect would be a bit different. The foliage wouldn't be discernable. There's the chance you'd see some shapes within the otherwise pitch black of the player shadow, but they'd vary every frame. You could make out the trees alongside the road, or the hay bales, but a human at that range would blend in with the noise. The trees against the sky would obviously be trees, but you wouldn't be able to pick out individual trees. The sky (unless given special treatment) would be noisy, but the clouds would be fairly stable.

Here you go, that second picture with a black bloom fullscreen shader applied.

Edit: Yes, it's stupidly blurry, but that image is also stupidly dark and desaturated. The effect matches the level of darkness regardless of the gamma/contrast/brightness setting. If implemented with good thresholds, it can even be workable during daytime to makes hiding in shadows more viable. And most importantly, it's an inexpensive (programmatically) effect, so even Jimmy playing on his grandma's toaster could have the effect forcibly enabled without crippling his framerate.

In other words, a dynamic render setting that makes any shaded area in the game look like *** while eating processing power to draw objects before it slathers vaseline over them. I'm sure the devs will get right on that just as soon as they bump character rendering past 3000m, put the alpha lighting effects back in, and switch hit detection to server side only.

Never going to happen.

I'd like this. Might make night assaults more different than simply "ohh look at the pretty tracers".

When I heard about Planetside2 having an actually dark night, I was impressed and I wanted to play. But i started playing and I was rather disappointed about how this 'Amazing darkness' wasn't actually dark....

I wan't to have an engaging experience, because at the moment, I don't even care if it's day or not, I just play and shoot people, I can always see them, and I don't have Gamma up and my brightness is at minimum...

Way back in Beta Indar used to get pitch black. It was awesome! Night fights were stunningly beautiful to behold, and scary as anything! Night vision was a huge help, but you had to know the night wouldn't last long so you needed a day option too.

Long dark, dark, nights would change up the combat. It would allow for specialized combat ops that would be challenging and overwhelming at the same time.

Please!! Long DARK nights again!

You mean like normal bloom, depth of field, FXAA or motion blur? All common effects that blur the scene as a post effect. Bloom is the cheapest of the cheap; it effectively uses no processing power it is so cheap. You're welcome to your opinion on what looks good or bad, but smudgey darkness is functional darkness, and in practice is far less exaggerated than in that picture. You don't layer black bloom on top of a hyper-dark scene, since black bloom serves the purpose that extreme darkness is meant to but fails to produce, which is low visibility. It's even compatible with HDR if you set its threshold based on the high precision lighting values instead of the post-HDR values (not that that doesn't also work, it just achieves a different effect and makes daytime shadows smudgey).

lolwut? Character rendering: Server side. Server side hit detection; Obviously server side. Darkness/effects: Client side. So, what you're saying is, because they can't make the servers work, they won't make the client work either? You're funny. Even more-so considering client and server are two completely different teams. For the last nail in your coffin, I present a theory: If you can't even see an enemy at 300m, it would help disguise any client/server rendering issues.

I think what you meant to say is "Confirmed Arma 2 does it very poorly".

This is one of the things i was really looking forward to with this game, and while it IS still impressive, its not AS impressive as it was, or it could be. Sometimes, night battles are he most fun, and visually impressive - i admit, i love the VS firefights at night, because of the energy weapons.

But a lot of the time, its not even that dark, its more like a bright twilight for most of the time, and while nice, its not as visually dramatic as i feel it could be.

As to spotting people at night, i have some trouble spotting the NC at night, but the dark VS colours are a problem, but then remember, i bet you anything their weapons show up more than other people as well, so they might be sneaky, but the second they open fire they are easier to spot.

As a small side note, to all my VS comrades, i know you like that yellow/dark camo thing - i don't know why, but i know you do - but.. can i just say that at range, before your name pops.. you look like NC.. and I have a tenancy to shoot you. Sorry about that, but its not entirely my fault..

Anyway.. it doesn't even have to be THAT much darker, just a little bit. And its been said in this thread already, but "More black, less blue". Solves a lot of the issue with darkness

how about ARMA OA?

ARMA has some of the most impressive version of thermal imaging i've seen(and night vision)- aside from SOCOM Confrontation, ARMA is top notch

as far as darker nights- with them having just hit the night optics a fourth time, we're about to lose all range on the night optics- adn that's not realistic- but furthermore, that means you can't night fight at anything but close-med range(shorter than your average engagement range unless you fight in canyons commonly)

tankfights? Hope you're 100 m at the farthest

Trying to lib bomb a bio lab's bottom? gotta fly below the airpads


What sort of nightfighting do they have in mind??? If they dont have it in mind, they intend for a intentional luff in fighting when night comes- for that ,they only had to increase the costs of the optics, really.

with the hits it already had, it was, before these new changes, situational

Anyway, ARMA looks like it needs some better "noise" built in.

It still does dark nights best IMO

Agreed. Agreed. Agreed.


1. Esamir at night with the green glow of the auroras... imagine if the nights were darker... those auroras would cast even more of a green glow on everything!

Having differing time cycles on each continent would actually benefit game-play.
Players who like night ops will chase the dark from continent to continent.
Players who like day ops will chase the sunshine from continent to continent.
This would help in spreading the 'zergs' a bit and changing up game-play.

And, yes, we need longer day / night durations... especially dusk and dawn.
The change is noticeable, when it should be subtle.


2. Vehicle / aircraft lighting:
TR should have red lights.
VS should have green lights.
NC should have blue lights.
Neutral / buildings should have white lights.

Aircraft should also have a white strobe on the tail rudder and/or belly.
(Like real world aircraft...)

The reasons for this are:
Red, green and blue light are real-world colours used for night ops for various applications and that reduce losing your natural night vision.
In PS2, each colour would define each faction, making target identification slightly easier for game-play reasons.


3. Perhaps certs spent on Stealth could allow you to kill all lights on your vehicle and 'run dark'.
How cool would that be!
Stealth Sundy anyone? Stealth Galaxy anyone? STEALTH FIGHTER ANYONE? Aww yeah!


4. Also, Apache helicopters, AC-130 gunships and many other real-world military assets have; zoom scopes, night vision and thermal / IR. So there shouldn't be any arguments about whether or not players can have both / all in game.
You got the certs, you used them, you get the advantage when night falls...


Great post OP!

I'd love to be able to buy additional slots. Like additional suit and equipment slots, multiple grenade slots. Same theory with the vehicles, multiple slots = multiple vision types = time and effort = improved performance night and day.

i agree but maybe instead of making night darker they could just implement different types of nights. like a full moon night...or the pitch black night ...etc...

The full moon nights are kinda cool and a mix of pitch black nights would really make it interesting...especially if randomly generated

AT least if you are suggesting this, It would be very nice if we had night vision on infantry aswell...

buy a NV scope? like vehicles buy thermal or NV sights?

I checked the wiki for you...
http://wiki.planetside-universe.com/ps/IRNV_Scope
http://wiki.planetside-universe.com/ps/IRNV_Scope_(Certification)