They aren't. I don't know if anybody works on them right now, but I think not. (Except for planet shadows/eclipses, those are in for a good time now.)

I saw mention of HDR somewhere being turned off and on while troubleshooting... and I don't remember where 🙁

Yeah here we go... this guy has it in his options menu

A long time ago we had a HDR option, but it didn't do a very good job and mostly just caused a lot of graphical glitches. We removed it to make the code cleaner with a view to adding it back it a more controlled way. We haven't got around to it yet.

Ah, cool thanks for the reply. If I ever get some free time maybe I'll dive into the code and see if I can't sort out some kind of planet surface shadow effect for us. That's where I feel it is really needed. It would really improve the landing experience.

Unlike most games where I think of HDR as an afterthought, I think it could quite vital in Pioneer where it would be nice to see where you're going both when having a facefull of O type star burninating your eyeballs and when in distant, distant orbit around faint brown dwarf.

Additionally it might help with having stars and local planets and moons adjust visibility to local lighting conditions.

In general, Pioneer's lighting system is still quite half baked.

On one hand it produces beautiful eclipses and lovely looking atmospheres, but on the other it doesn't even account for intensity of light depending on distance from the source (I figure some sort of logarithmic scale would be handy) and the coloured light is sometimes a bit off compared to what one would expect from thermal spectrum (for example the most charitable adjective I can think of when describing the light of Pioneer's K type stars is "piss yellow" which isn't quite the golden glow dissolving into whiteness as  we approach G I would expect and hope for).