It isn’t Discourse, we’ll start posting in PNGs going forward.
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I know very little about computer graphics and even less about lighting so I don’t know what emissive scalar means but turning it down sounds like reducing how much light something emits (and illuminates surrounding materials). Isn’t that completely different from camera bloom?
I’m looking at the cockpit in the 3rd image - it’s illuminating the empty space around it- there is nothing in space for it to illuminate. In my book that’s glow/camera bloom.
Personally I don’t want to be reminded that I’m on the other side of a camera/screen, I want to be immersed. I’d rather not have bloom or any other camera effects.
Please explain if I’ve misunderstood what the emmisive scalar is. Thanks.
Edit: Oops. Just seen the other thread. Please reply there if you feel that’s appropriate.
Artists only have control of the emissive intensity, we can’t manipulate the HDR bloom resultant effect by any other means. This is what Andre means when he says it’s as easy as changing a scalar value, because that is all we have access to.
Also the emissive texture itself does not bounce light off of nearby geometry, we’d have to add lights in engine to achieve that effect. Those images are strictly emissive strength + the engine bloom effect. [quote=“hrobertson, post:63, topic:191”]
Personally I don’t want to be reminded that I’m on the other side of a camera/screen, I want to be immersed. I’d rather not have bloom or any other camera effects.
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We plan on bloom, lens flares, motion blur, etc
Lol.
Hang on, are you serious?
Yes, 10 characters
Will we be able to turn it off?
I don’t see why not, but I guess Keith or Flavien would have to confirm them as graphics options.
When I play games I generally leave all that stuff on except motion blur, I have never played with any motion blur that doesn’t annoy me…
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Your eye causes bloom as well, the type of camera + film (and your eye is actually a type of camera) affect how bloom looks. Our implementation is currently fairly generic for performance reasons. It’s too early to know exactly which graphics options can be turned on/off. A lot of that will depend on testing performance on various hardware configurations and how much having something on/off could affect the fairness of gameplay.
I know. But no in-engine bloom I’ve ever seen looks like real eye bloom, it just looks like stuff is glowing.
If you could implement realistic bloom then great, but I don’t think that’s likely so I’d rather have none at all. Just my preference.
I’d add Depth of Field to that.
Hmm, I don’t recall playing a game that had that 
DoF in MWO drove me absolutely crazy. That had to be the worst usage and implementation of DoF I’ve ever seen.
Are you saying that faking bloom stops our eyes from causing it, or that we should expect our eyes to cause the bloom to bloom?
Honestly, the interface between gamer and game is limiting enough without actively wasting resources making the game look worse. Please try to balance it for as high tricount and texture resolution as you can squeeze out of “minimum specs” and then leave bloom, dof, lens flare, motion blur, AA, and whatever other postprocessing you’re planning for people with more money than sense?
I hope to include myself in that category, I think AA looks great, but for the love of cats on the internet don’t force everyone to look at something out of an old movie just because you, I, or anyone else thinks it looks quaint.
Keith can probably explain it better, but bloom is an aspect/function of HDR rendering in computer graphics to make what you see on screen more compatible to what your eyes see in the real life outside world. I don’t believe your eyes would see bloom off an LCD screen playing any game no matter the type of rendering, hence the reason HDR rendering tries to approximate real life lighting conditions. And yes, some games abuse aspects of HDR rendering to exaggerate real life conditions using it as an art/aesthetics tool (and for that matter other aspects like color saturation and contrast, etc). We’re leaning towards realistic, and ultimately we’ll do what we feel is best for the aesthetics of the game. Now things like lens flares, I would hope such effects would be options, but as Keith said earlier, we don’t yet know what will be user options at this point.
I take it that you didn’t play Mirror’s Edge? After about five minutes of play, I was desperately searching for how to fiddle with the config files to kill its DoF with prejudice (and very glad that I wasn’t playing it on console).
Is there even a game where DoF is implemented well? I mean, apart from sweeping poorer graphics under the rug? I have yet to understand the interest of it at all in-game (cut-scenes can use it to mimic film and focus on important elements and such).
Maybe in sims where you use flawed equipment that doesn’t let you focus on what you want, or where focus has to be manually set?
Depth of Field is hard to be done realistically in any game in my opinion … because then it would need to read your mind.
Bloom on the other hand is more forgiving.
The problem is that the eyes and the brain work extremely good together to mitigate DoF.
Your eyes do indeed have Depth of Field. But micro movement of the eye don’t only “Scan” areas of a Picture but also different depths.
For me Depth of Field is only noticeable when looking at a picture with something 20 cm in front and something 20 meters in the back. The instant (about a quarter of a second) I think about the trees outside of my window they are focused.
I would say try a very broad depth of field with smooth edges and a fast focus.
As Lomsor said, realistic DoF would require eye tracking to know where on your LCD your eyes are focused.
Maybe in years to come we’ll all have hardware that supports eye tracking. Until then I think the best option is to not have DoF at all.
Bloom in video game graphics is simply an optical illusion to that allows more information to be given to the player in an intuitive manner. The reason that bloom is needed is that your monitor can only generate brightness in effects up to its own limitations. To fake a light that is brighter than the monitor can display you use bloom. This tells the player’s brain that the light is brighter than it really is because we associate blooming effects with very bright lights.
I wholeheartedly agree.
I simply cant stand motion blur.
Not only is it annoying to look at. In most cases it actually make mouse response slightly delayed.
If game doesn’t have way to disable it, i simply cant play it.
From the top of my head for instance AVP3 didn’t have this option. (at least the demo didn’t)
However what i can accept, was the way Volition did something like that in Freespace (or in sequel)
If you moved your ship fast enough some of the stars in background faded.
So the player would perceive important objects in more contrast. It was actually useful in hectic situations.
But it wasn’t really blur per se.
DoF ? Your eyes do that same thing. Why bother?
But its not that annoying.
It same issue like 3d movies.
In every motion picture you are forced to look what cameraman wanted you to look at. And in case of 3d movie this effect is even stronger.
Yeah its nice once in a while, but I prefer normal.
Now that you say that, there are some games that use DoF like that. For example, FPS where the weapon is unfocused in iron sight, or when you are focusing on the object at hand and the background is blurred (like when modifying weapons in Crysis, for example).
Using tracking to focus on what you are looking at - I wonder how well this would work.
AFAICT, my eyes’ bloom don’t look like the smooth, regular one we see in games. It is more like dozens of thin spikes (a bit like an ursine), who are not quite regular in brightness (a partial ‘dotted line’ effect), with a small splash right around the light itself, making its borders slightly irregular.
While we’re at it, red light doesn’t cause the eye to adapt. Would it be possible to make a HDR where the red colour isn’t taken into account for the light level adaptation? I can see a few applications in games where, like IRL, red light would be used in low-light environment for this reason.