[Suggestion] Bring back the old Amerish skyfile!

Discussion in 'PlanetSide 2 Gameplay Discussion' started by EmeraldShadow, Apr 18, 2021.

  1. EmeraldShadow

    The old Amerish lighting settings in ~2013-2016 were beautiful. Blue shadows, colorful sky. Now the continent is very grey and low contrast, and you can barely see the lighting that's there.

    I don't think this was an optimization. All the FX are still there, just the sky file parameters are different.

    Here is a video that contains some old footage (2:43 timestamp and onwards for Amerish footage)


    Other continents have seen similar greying changes, but Amerish was hit the worst IMO.

    This game still has the potential to be beautiful like it once was. Simply bringing back the old skyfiles, beautiful old base shields (pre-hossin), and old biolab domes... and we have planetside's beauty back.
    • Up x 4
  2. UberNoob1337101

    100% agree.

    On a similar note, bringing back old ultra settings as an option would also be nice now that there are graphics cards and CPUs that can easily run the game.
    • Up x 1
  3. Pikachu

    Most people don't even notice the change, and when they do they prefer Earth like environments. :L
  4. EmeraldShadow

    I think people very much do. Every week there's a post about the "old graphics", every old footage of the game has comments about it, etc.
  5. TouristZ


    I think whether people noticed or not isn't exactly relevant. If you run the game on high or ultra, the effects are still there. They're just turned down so low that you can only barely see them. If the effects are already there, and your computer is, technically, already doing the work of rendering them, logically you'd be able to crank them up with no performance impact.

    Unfortunately, I can't do any performance tests that would crank up the effects to confirm that there's no performance impact, but I'm just using what little I know about graphics and making an educated guess. They should be post-processing effects, which, to my knowledge, are insanely easy to render. If there is any performance impact, it's so small that it's not even worth considering.

    However, the only actual proof I have of how un-demanding these effects are is when You're either near an orbital strike or when you get EMP'd. When you're near an OS the bloom gets turned way up, the sun looks beautiful, and I can't recall my framerate ever dropping due to an OS making the game look awesome for a short 10 seconds.

    Also, without those effects, the game just does not hold up graphically. Literally free graphics.
  6. Pikachu

    What are you talking about? Performance? Effects? Skyfiles are about color, textures, lighting, fog density and sun movement. :confused:
  7. TouristZ

    I mean, I could be wrong. The only reason I'm bringing up "performance" is because when anyone suggests making the game look even slightly prettier, some players will come out and say "That might make the game run worse, therefore it can NEVER happen", when in reality you're not even losing half a frame.

    Basically, I'm trying to say that making your game look slightly more colorful isn't gonna cost you any frames. Oh, btw, your forum signature is how the sun is supposed to look, not the "White circle just existing in the sky, no bloom or anything" that it is now.
  8. Pikachu

    You are one of the few that care what the sun and sky looks like. The devs didn't even care that the sky and sun were out of sync during sunset and sunrise on Amerish ever since they decided to brighten and shorten the nights somewhere in 2015 or so. They even put it on a trailer. Anyway ideally the sun should not have a simple bloom effect like a radial gradient, but rather a set of uneven diffraction spikes like in real life (to both camera and eyeball).
    [IMG]
  9. EmeraldShadow

    The little things add up. Regardless, more than just the sun, Amerish looked far better before it became the grey mess it is currently.

    Half the eyesores in this game don't even improve performance, and could all be fixed in 1 day.
  10. ican'taim

    well godrays are on the PTS so it's possible