To all SSC Station occupants
Thank you for the donations over the past year (2024), it is much appreciated. I am still trying to figure out how to migrate the forums to another community software (probably phpbb) but in the meantime I have updated the forum software to the latest version. SSC has been around a while so their is some very long time members here still using the site, thanks for making SSC home and sorry I haven't been as vocal as I should be in the forums I will try to improve my posting frequency.
Thank you again to all of the members that do take the time to donate a little, it helps keep this station functioning on the outer reaches of space.
-D1-
I knew him, forum dwellers: a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy.
Today we removed the "HDR" graphics option from Pioneer. The latest nightlies and alpha 20 will not include this option any more. Because its a popular setting, I thought I should write a bit about the motivation behind removing it and the plan going forward.
The HDR option does not actually implement "true" HDR but instead average brightness across the scene and adds some glow effects. It does this in an all-or-nothing manner, which sometimes makes things look great (like turning stars into blazing infernos or hiding background stars during the daytime on Earth), but other times does utterly horrible things (like making entire planets washed-out overbright messes; what bchimself calls "sun-blasted" in his Let's Play series). So it doesn't truly implement HDR, and what it does implement doesn't make sense in when applied to the entire scene indiscriminately.
The manner in which it has been implemented also causes problems. When, for whatever reason, things are made too bright, its not uncommon to see flickering, blackouts and other weirdness in the way the scene is being drawn. Its been getting bad enough lately that a significant amount of time has been spent trying to tweak it and coax it into doing the right thing. Its rather like a game of whack-a-mole, where one bug squished results in two more popping up elsewhere. Its further complicated by the fact that different graphics cards and different versions of drivers can produce different results, but we can't test on all of them.
The possibility of removing it entirely was floated a couple of weeks, and after quite a bit of discussion some consensus formed around removing the current implementation with a view to improve the way specific game elements are drawn to make sure they look good in all situations. A great example is the new thruster and laser graphics, which are bright and glowy without requiring the old "HDR" code.
Something we will be working on is making sure that existing visuals that really did look good under HDR will continue to. Two good examples of this are those mentioned above - making stars look incredibly bright and hiding background stars when on the ground of a planet with atmosphere. Right now these don't look as good as they have under HDR, but we will be working to make sure those and a few other things look good/different in the specific circumstances they need to.
From this we're expecting that Pioneer's visuals will improve as a result of more focused development activity, and the few hardcore graphics developers will now have more time and space to work on interesting stuff without having to worry about breaking and maintaining the HDR codepath. I think you'll all like where we're headed!
Feel free to comment on this this change right here in this thread. Cheers.
Actually, I always thought (mostly) the game looked better without it robn. 🙂
Fixed that for you 😆
That part of it actually worked, it successfully compressed high values into a smaller range. I always felt it could work given enough tweaking. AE and myself both have HDR branches which fix almost every bug.
Remember HDR is supposed to simulate the Human eye, which it actually does with marginal success, except in a few situations. (Like staring into the center of a bright object, which makes it dim too much. However that bug is fixed in Ae's branch.)
I actually don't think its physically possible to do some of the things we want without HDR. (Tonemapping is desirable in low-light conditions as it would simulate the pupils in your eyes adjusting to the light, oth some stuff *can* be done much better without it as you know 🙂 like glows)
Fixed that for you 😆
hehe "infinite contrast"... Thats actually more true than you realise, or maybe you meant it that way 🙂 One bug was values overflowing to extreme numbers, so you almost would have infinite contrast between the 0 of space and the 100000s in the overflowing star. 😉
Well... in fact I don´t like the idea. There were a lot of details in wich hdr looked great. One of them was the contrast when you were orbiting an atmosphere planet like earth. The atmosphere layer had a great color and contrast depending the rotating view. The result was very realistic, close to real thing (space shuttle photos etc...). And of course all the details you have annoted. The Sky at daytime occulting stars was a step forward.
I agree some things were weird and broken on other details, but I think it was worth the switching.
Every program out there has HDR in any sense, why not pioneer?... snifff... 🙄 🙂
The time will say.
Greetings!
About pros and cons I can say, testing it, that, for example, earth, looks better without HDR at medium distance from earth to moon. and looks less realistic at very close orbit from earth.
The suns looks better without HDR at AU distances, they bright. And less cool and realistic at close distances, were the sun looks like those real images we can see.
So I understand the devs decission. Considering the game does not look bad at all without the working HDR details.
I am confident in future alphas.
Greetings
Can't believe no-ones posted that yet 😀
Speaking as a photographer with some HDR in my portfolio, I can categorically state that it's the photographers who have the terminology wrong. While we do end up with a high dynamic range data file, that range is compressed on output, giving a dynamic range low enough to be seen by the human eye without adjusting.
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