Indoor darkness

[Wasteland Watcher]

Since the "Tireless menace" update it seems me that interiors of buildings are substantially darker. 

 By design? 

[Patrick Carlson]

On 5/11/2016 at 9:57 PM, Wasteland Watcher said:

Since the "Tireless menace" update it seems me that interiors of buildings are substantially darker. 

 By design? 

For some players, the color grading introduced in the last major update may have darkened the interiors in some locations. It's an issue we are currently working on. 

[Wasteland Watcher]

Thank you very much for the info and also much thanks and appreciation for fixing it

@Patrick Carlson

[nicko]

Thanks also!

my interiors seem dark as atm. Currently I'm in PV homestead and you can't even see the main exit door. I have noticed this a few times with other buildings, game versions etc. Some exit  door areas / buildings are just way to dark, if you want them that dark let us add some sort of Illuminations stick or something to find them == Exit.

[Wastelander]

On 20.5.2016 at 7:58 PM, Patrick Carlson said:

For some players, the color grading introduced in the last major update may have darkened the interiors in some locations. It's an issue we are currently working on. 

I gotta give Hinterland some serious cred here - I have never in my life (and I play a lot of indie-games) witnessed a development studio that is so invested in it's community. It's seriously refreshing to have bug reports to be met with what I quoted, not a 'Yeah, well, you bought already, so....'

On the technical side, could this maybe depend on GPU's?

[nicko]

I doubt it gpu just game tweaks on their side.

[Ruruwawa]

3 hours ago, Wastelander said:

I gotta give Hinterland some serious cred here - I have never in my life (and I play a lot of indie-games) witnessed a development studio that is so invested in it's community. It's seriously refreshing to have bug reports to be met with what I quoted, not a 'Yeah, well, you bought already, so....'

On the technical side, could this maybe depend on GPU's?

I've read a LOT of posts about this issue, since I'm affected by it.  (For me many daytime interiors are window-shaped "decorations" on the walls plus a shaft of light and a light spot on the floor.  The rest of the room is dark as night.)

I'm no expert.  But summing up what I've read from others, I'm pretty sure it's down to monitor + graphics drivers and occurs mostly on PCs.  The typical solution in a 3d game for the huge variability of PC hardware is a gamma setting.  But apparently the Unity engine does include native support for a global gamma setting.  Hinterland would have to write their own gamma system and the code would touch every 3d object in the game (yikes).

Re-lighting the interiors seems like much less effort.

[Tbone555]

i love the darkness effects as they currently are. the interiors could use a tiny bit extra lighting, but for the most part this game offers a very realistic darkness and that's uncommon in gaming.

but for the love of fluffy, give us some candles or something to light the interior! there've been several posts about finding candles in the coastal houses, or making our own from animal fat. i dunno about yall, but dropping a lit torch on the ground, and setting it on a nice dry wooden table to simulate having a candle just feels unsafe to me.. sick of wasting every ounce of kerosene i find just to find my way around my home base.

while i'm on the subject of lighting, i imagine any interior is going to be pretty eerie in the story mode. just imagine - youre taking shelter in the camp office, and youre waken in the middle of the night by the loud emergency warning message blasting over the radio. you look outside through the window, and the aurora, majestic as it is, is flaring across the AM night sky. just as you turn, the lights in the office suddenly start flickering on and off, until the bulb overloads and explodes. suddenly a fire starts up inside the very cabin youre residing in. you have no time to grab anything more than your bedroll and that old bottle of rotgut you were keeping under the bed. you flee to one of the fishing cabins, turn around and watch the cabin go up in flames in the night with all of your supplies, burning with it. then suddenly, you hear the snarling of a hungry wolf inching up behind you.

ANYWAY. my point is, the aurora is gonna make the electricity go haywire like that and make lights flicker on and thats gonna be pretty cool

 

[Wastelander]

Quote

ANYWAY. my point is, the aurora is gonna make the electricity go haywire like that and make lights flicker on and thats gonna be pretty cool

I know they're gonna happen eventually. They're probably going to be announced. I have a pretty good idea from the trailer what they're gonna be like. I will still require a change of wardrobe after first witnessing them.

[Wasteland Watcher]

9 hours ago, Wastelander said:

On the technical side, could this maybe depend on GPU's?

 

9 hours ago, nicko said:

I doubt it gpu just game tweaks on their side.

 

7 hours ago, Ruruwawa said:

I've read a LOT of posts about this issue, since I'm affected by it.  (For me many daytime interiors are window-shaped "decorations" on the walls plus a shaft of light and a light spot on the floor.  The rest of the room is dark as night.)

I'm no expert.  But summing up what I've read from others, I'm pretty sure it's down to monitor + graphics drivers and occurs mostly on PCs.  The typical solution in a 3d game for the huge variability of PC hardware is a gamma setting.  But apparently the Unity engine does include native support for a global gamma setting.  Hinterland would have to write their own gamma system and the code would touch every 3d object in the game (yikes).

Re-lighting the interiors seems like much less effort.

The "new" dark interiors affected both of the two systems I primarily play on, one a desktop with an AMD R9 290 and the other being a laptop with a GeForce 980M, which indicated that the issue was not with the GPU. My workaround was messing with gamma settings on both systems which feels like cheating.

The interior's previous lighting was still pretty dark but nothing like what we saw after Tireless Menace update.

I'll be glad to be able to see inside buildings during daylight hours again  

[Ruruwawa]

18 minutes ago, Wasteland Watcher said:

My workaround was messing with gamma settings

I tried this too, it's slightly easier to see, but I'm still not back to where I was before the update (which for me was still much darker than virtually every screenshot or let's play I've seen).  The problem with increasing gamma system-wide is that it washes out everything else I do on my computer.  Websites like this one look like a blank sheet of white paper.

I've tried a lot of other things too: every driver version ever published for my AMD GPU, DX9 vs DX11, tons of different monitor settings.... even tabbing out to my graphics driver program to increase the brightness when I enter a building, and tabbing out again when I leave the build to set it back. (Ugh!)  None of this gives me super bright interiors btw... at best it lets me find the door in the daytime without using a lantern.

I've honestly never had this problem with any other game.  At worst I might tweak in-game gamma by 10% and never think about it again.  Something special to do with Unity, I guess.

[Wasteland Watcher]

@Ruruwawa 

 Like you, I adjust gamma when I go indoors, and switch it back to when I go outdoors for the time being.

I agree with you that messing with Gamma settings is definitely not a solution, just a workaround we use to get us by until the fix is implemented.

 

And God bless Hinterland Studios, it is coming soon! 

 

[Scyzara]

6 hours ago, Wasteland Watcher said:

And God bless Hinterland Studios, it is coming soon! 

Tomorrow's hotfix should hopefully solve the current lighting problems!

 

 

[Ruruwawa]

12 hours ago, Wasteland Watcher said:

And God bless Hinterland Studios, it is coming soon! 

Indeed, these guys are so awesome!