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.