Maybe they should do some sort of rocket flares .. so the people can light up the Ground for a few seconds. But i must say .. i like the darkness. Furthermore... the Continents should have different nights. So for the people who like bright nights ... they will be happy on Indar or Esamir an so on. And the people who love darker nights .... will love hossin. I think this is a good solution for all. By the way .. here additional a very nice pic of a hossin night.
One solution would be to hand out portable light sources to the players: - Flares that are actually flares and not just fireworks that go up 100-200m, then float down for 30 seconds then sputter around on the ground for another 30 seconds. - Engineer mounted lights that last for 5 minutes. - Landing lights on Galaxies. - Increased illumination from vehicle headlights (mostly range).
For like months I would post in every thread about night, that SOE should have "dark nights" every 3 or 4 cycles, ideally something that doesn't synch up with the same time every day, so that people can exeperience both types even if they play around the same time. Additionally, I feel like there could potentially be some sort of visual cue / broadcast message like "Dark night inc" Just to let people know this is going to be actually dark. In order to compliment it so that night isn't just IR/NV time, Flash lights, and Vehicle headlamps need to be much brighter, with a larger Area of effect, and the light needs to Render for ALL players, such that You can Park a harasser with head lights on at a gate and use it to light up infantry runing through for everyone. Even if it's just some sort of Fuzzy "Light pollution" variable, where Lights in poximity to you slowly just raise the local brightness for everyone to save on computing power. Like if there's 10 Lights on in your area then gamma essentially gets raised a bit, more lights more gamma, that way you' don't need to render every single light source in order to illuminate an area. Make it more like diffused lighting, and less shadow calculations. I'm not sure how it could be modeled efficiently (I'll leave that to the devs). I just feel like we don't need perfect lights, but it would be nice to have a way of creating illuminated areas. That way holding a flashlight isn't just a big shoot me sign.
You realize this is why nights were lightened in the first place? Rendering and tracking of so many player controlled dynamic light sources was killing performance.
So Basically, flashlights are out because of Lightning issues (Like the fireworks guns). So what we need is to have is fewer, but more powerful light sources. What about parachute flares? Consumable, costs like 25 inf. Shoots a flare up that floats down for like 1 or 2 minutes. Or, move away from dynamic player lights. Give bases giant flood lights that can get hacked / disabled. Make them another base objective. Keep the area outside of bases dark as **** to promote night time ambushes / scouting / recon / infiltration etc.
They put spotlights on the Phalanx turrets at one point in the beta. Their strength was laughable. (from the top of the wall the light barely hit the ground 15m away from the wall) They did increase base lighting, but it was enough on it's own. Give it time, the engine will evolve as will peoples hardware and they'll be able to improve the dynamic lighting situation and we'll have proper flashlights, headlights, base spotlights, and illumination flares.
Thats nice .. now i saw that the default setting for the brightness in the PS2 Testclient was and is 0 and not 0.5 So maybe the whole discussion on darkness of Hossin night is maybe only caused by a other setting as in the Live Client.
