Updates to darker lighting on Indar

Those dastardly developers, listening to what people were worried about.

+1 for shifting time zones.

I still believe there is *some* room to make nights darker on Indar and extend the day/night cycle by 50%. But I agree that unless some additional systems are put into place, there's no room to make night a *lot* darker.

By additional systems I would say you would have needed to:

• Do mostly nothing for infantry. They all have access to HS/NV scopes and can refit at any sunderer / weapon terminal.
• Improve flashlights, a lot. Which requires game engine changes to get something more then a cosmetic effect.
• Add shoulder mounted lights to MAX units. Or possibly "night vision" that can't see through smoke.
• Vehicle drivers (Galaxy, Sunderer, Harasser) would have needed some sort of night vision.
• Vehicle weapons would have needed either some way to refit in the field, or a second vision system added.
• Vehicle headlights would need more range (again... game engine change).

But there's also some room for new features that work well with darker nights:

• Base lighting that can be destroyed / disabled / repaired.
• Portable lighting towers.
• Hacking of base defenses to turn off lights in various areas.
• Addition of parachute-flares that lights up a 100m area for 30 seconds.
• Glowsticks with a 3 minute lifetime.

Glad we are waiting for darker nights, we need a whole revamp for it to function properly so dont do it until it can be done right.

Does that mean it will get a revisit later down the road, so it can be done properly, or is this the best we'll get?

It wasn't even dark... Was expecting things to go the other way honestly. On brightness 0 this is the darkest I saw it on PTS:

Everything is completely visible as if there's a very strong ambient term applied to everything.

I mentioned this in a few places that when you guys implement things correctly please test on low end monitors. Those of us asking for darker nights are using good monitors which give us a higher gamut range of colors. As an example in the following image we see all 16 colors clearly:

I can even on my bad work laptop display. (It's very distinct on my gaming laptop with 72% gamut and on a 90% display it's a massive difference).

I know you guys are looking for solutions and I'd recommend lowering contrast over distance for non-bright objects. A simple contrast filter would color shift to this:

That muddles the colors eliminating any advantage camos would have in the darkness between the faction colors and coverage. That said once you guys can sort out base lighting it should look like this following image (assuming your on a 60% of higher gamut LCD you can clearly see the road and towers and would see vehicles coming through the gate but soldiers might be a tad blurry in the distance). Also need much larger light radii on projectiles like rockets.

I understand the above image might not look immersive if you're on a bad screen. It would be up to the devs to implement threshold functions for the darkness so both low and high gamut screens see the same thing. That would require multiple displays and testing to get to sane values. My above image doesn't have a threshold function applied so good monitors can see minor details that others can't.

Pfftch,.. pfff.
http://1.bp.************/-DbnzDYH2g7c/TxCETIxBbOI/AAAAAAAACeI/exqTvkhGk-A/s1600/the new year 2012 207.jpg
Hurr, durr.

Those nights and some other topics seem more important than everything else the community focuses on, such a shame.

In order to please everyone I guess such a decision would be the best and ok.

The devs totally confirm that you are right and everyone else has no idea what they are talking about and are wrong in every aspect.

Just curious. How old is your monitor and how much did it cost?

2.5 years, and I'm not 100% sure on specifics. It was in the P170HM Clevo laptops at the time. Something called a "Glossy GlassView LED Display". At the time I remember reading they were equivalent to the 72% gamut LCDs, but now I'm not so sure they were talking about mine. Every LCD monitor I was trying at work wasn't as vibrant.

So anyway the reason I decided to post again. I was testing out different displays at work (I have hundreds of displays where I work) and wow there is a difference. First I tested on my HTC One and I could see 6 colors in my palette. I have a new Clevo at work so I fired it up which uses a matte LCD screen. I could see 6 colors and some of the next line. On a few others I could only see the top line. Not a single one would let me see all 18 so clearly.

After some research I realized that LED monitors with glossy displays are way more vibrant than the LCDs most people pick up. No wonder people randomly feel so passionate about not having darkness.

So if you can only see the top line of this then for me (and people with good monitors probably) it looks like this to us. I sat here comparing a cheap LCD (and my phone) against my laptop for a bit to create the two images. Huge difference. It shows that if the devs are to support darkness they need to test a lot of displays and implement contrast filters that remove the advantage a high gamut screen would give players.

edit, I should mention this would only need to be done at night. So stair-stepping the green color channel for instance or other small changes in a post-processing shader along with thresholding for extreme colors would greatly reduce the difference. A high gamut screen can see the color differences into white, red, green, and blue, and black a little better so those would just need to be set equal past a certain value. Could probably map them to a gamut graph and normalize the colors in ranges by eye.

It sounds reasonable to me. Btw once I scored a taco combo at the mexican restaurant and almost died.

I can barely see the the top line color brackets, not even mentioning the lower pallets since they appear to be non existent, black.

ASUS VW221 2008 with a cut out back square hole for heat vents, It wants to die after the 3 years or so warranty.

Vision is based on contrast. Specific aspects of game play like camo effectiveness rely quite a lot on contrast. The issues raised over camo-coverage, new cloak near invisibility on low settings/old cloak high visibility exploit on low settings, vanu camo advantage at night, new hipfire hitmarkers being camouflaged by TR red is evidence of that.

Pros:

• Changes up the tactical situation.

• Can be quite evocative, if PS2 had systems where players had to provide and maintain a lot of the lighting manually (with infiltrators being able to sabotage systems). This would be a huge amount of work to design a set of systems and change mechanics to be about providing light at night.

Cons:

• Player tags currently show up at night.

• Currently brightness cannot be changed when running in windowed mode, so what ever setting is used for desktop tasks applies.
• Favours long range low risk campy gameplay, if ADS allows use of scopes which alone counter night. Perhaps there needs to be goggles/glasses or no way of countering it other than through lights.

Visibility depends on:

• Monitor contrast settings
• Monitor brightness settings

• Driver control panel brightness
• Driver control panel contrast
• Driver control panel Gamma

• The physical brightness capabilities of of the monitor, and the contrast capability. These vary a lot.
• The brightness of the real life background where the screen sits - some people might be playing in a darkened room at night, whereas others might be on a different continent playing in a sunlit room.
• Most players probably use factory settings for their monitor, and haven't changed them. Others might have optimised monitor settings for reading text (high contrast).
• Players use monitors ranging from laptop monitors to TV screens, each with different hardware capabilities.

If there is an environment lighting component, even a fractional one, long time players will just turn brightness right up.

The large amount of players who used the old high visibility cloak exploit, and the amount of players who currently run on low graphics settings even though they have acceptable FPS on medium/high settings is evidence of this. As itzmurda hilariously put it.

TL;DR

• Players who don't have suitable monitors, players that play in bright environments and players that don't mess about with brightness software and hardware settings - either because they aren't prepared to put up with very distorted brightness/contrast for the sake of gameplay, because they like the dark aesthetic, because they need brightness/contrast adjusted for other tasks, or are occasional/new players - will be disadvantaged.

Night-time brightness slider?


If an option was included to control the strength of the environmental lighting at night, via a slider, it would be interesting to see how many players would voluntarily turn down lighting knowing others would be able to see better. This is the exact scenario that would happen if dark nights were implemented by force in game, but could be changed outside the game provided players were inclined to jump the technical barriers and put up with distorted graphics during day or put up with the hassle of adjusting brightness. Of course, with a night time brightness slider disadvantaged players could adjust without jumping over hurdles.

If a night-time brightness slider is unacceptable to players, then you'd logically think enforced brightness with the option to skip it through external tweaking would be unacceptable too.

Alternatives

• The best way to introduce varying tactical situations due to environmental factors is through weather. PS2 is set on a different planet so there can be absolutely epic weather or environmental events. Being set on a different planet, these effects can be designed such that changing settings doesn't confer an advantage.
  • The effects could impact everything from visibility in a way that couldn't be avoided, systems effectiveness, specific missions/tasks that give strategic/tactical bonuses, through to resource collection/availability in the upcoming resource revamp. Forecasts with varying certainties would allow strategic planning.

I actually thought the different timezone was already a thing.

Why you giving VS a bigger advantage...? Their natural camo will be harder to see at night. Must I put NV scope on everything?

As Syrian already mentioned, the idea of the darker night was to make itso dark -> that no one would see each other properly. Though this whole discussion if vanu gets an advantage will vanished when it gets darker.Lazyness should not be reviewed....

I actually dont mind that people turn up brightness, it might make it difficult but the devs need to make it on each way darker so brightness wont work and here we got the whole thing.
I truely also agree that a better lighting would be needed as well, but we cant have 50 things at one time...please dont take me wrong, but I think the more we ask for things for the darker night - the more the patch for it will be abadoned by the devs or put far in the feature.
It is good and cool to make suggestions, but i would be glad if even the bit darker night from the test server would be implemented on live, THEN they could make proper lightings and at last the great darkness would arrive.

YES!

Varying moon phases for dark nights?

Continents in different time zones?

Sounds perfect.

After OMFG maybe some of these auxiliary systems can be worked on to make the whole experience better, but this is a definite step up IMO