As I mention in this blog article, and as @INovaeGene already mentions, bloom is caused naturally by a scene with a large range of luminances that are both within and outside of your eye’s current visible luminances. Therefore for us to naturally cause bloom in your eye you would have to use an HDR display that is capable of outputting a similar range of luminances. Since you, along with most everybody else, are using a crappy LDR display we have to fake the effect for you. As @Crayfish mentions the bloom effect subconsciously makes you think part of the image is brighter so while a generic bloom algorithm isn’t perfect it goes a long way toward creating convincing HDR scenes. Without bloom you would just have over-saturated parts of the image that look really weird. Perhaps at some point I’ll post a screen shot of what an HDR scene looks like without bloom, it looks kinda funny.
One thing i would beg you guys, by TotalBiscuit’s monocle, to include every single graphics option available as a slider and/or toggle in the options menu. Don’t assume “ah, it looks good anyway” and neglect to include. If the engine allows it please let us toggle it. Everything, like shadows, reflections, DOF, Bloom, Blur, Tessalation, texture quality, AF, AA, SSAO, FOV slider, HDR, mip level, render scale, render range, etc… I know it makes the game look worse but it is important to let us chose.
What if my PC is crappy and all i have is a knob that turns Low, Medium and High? What if it’s a beast and i want to set the render scale to 2 and everything else on Ultra? What about mods taking some options even further? This isn’t a console port, please include all available options, even if through an .ini line only.
We’ll do the best we can. Some things we may not make available for changing, outside of a mod, due to gameplay fairness issues however we will definitely be soliciting community feedback during alpha/beta to make the game as inclusive as possible.
“due to gameplay fairness issues”
I can’t possibly think of anything that affects fairness of play that has to do with graphics since all options are available to all? I guess we’ll have to wait for the alpha/beta to actually see how it works.
When there are graphical effects that can obstruct player view and one player has them turned off while another has them turned on that can introduce balance issues.
Cockpits can do that to. third person godview vs a cockpit view that can be disorienting at times.
Fortunate, then, that the devs must have stated hundreds of times by now that cockpit view wont be in game at launch, if ever.
But yeah, while I’m a big fan of being able to turn off the stuff that blurs out details, I really hate how games like DayZ lets you turn off enough of the details themselves to give an advantage to players willing to let their game look terrible. Nothing quite so disruptive to immersion as the knowledge that what you’re seeing is most often only barely reminiscent of what other players see.
Cockpits will most definitely be in I:B.
I think maybe what you’re referring to are old discussions about Infinity the MMO, back when we were running under the contributions system.
Yeah… discussions which I had not seen any official word no longer applied until just now.
Excellent.
EDIT: Turns out I had seen official word but simply not perceived it as such since it was part of a post mostly concerned with turning down an idea to replace landing gear with cockpit interiors. I read it as “no, landing legs rather than cockpits” while what it said was “no, both landing legs and cockpits”.
Even back then, the discussion was about the implementation of 3D modelled cockpits like in the 2010 tech demo.
I believe a 1st person ‘cockpit view’ has always been a definite.
Are you referring to just the periphery of a forward facing view, or a full cockpit interior like in this image?
Full cockpit interior is the current plan.
Good to know. In games or sims of the caliber that I.B. is scaling itself how can you not have full cockpits…
Huh, I have yet to decide if I prefer cockpit view or third person, for space combat. I have to admit I love taking a look at my ship sometimes though, do you plan any kind of panoramic cam just for when we want to take a screenshot or such?
Maybe when it’s landed have a 3ed person view or docked or some other non-combat time.
I’m not opposed to having a 3rd person camera since I also like to look at how cool my ship looks but it’s unlikely it’ll contain any cockpit instrumentation or other information so as to be primarily artistic. The exception to this may be large capital ships which will likely only have a 3rd person view.
Speaking of, if it’s not currently to early too ask, how do you plan on capital-ship controls working. I assume that it would be impractical to fly anything larger than a Hunter with WASD and mouse-look.
Too early to definitively say I’m afraid =) How I personally envision it is more like how you would move a large ship in an RTS but the other guys on the team may have other ideas and ultimately play testing will determine the bulk of it.
By the ammount of stuff that needs playtesting I guess we should start allready, right?
That’s why those who pledge the alpha tier will have access to a build as soon as we can get it to them. We’re trying to make our dev process very iterative and, once the KS is done, very inclusive =).
And that’s why I hope to keep enough money to get in that tier, testing capital ships for example will be ESSENTIAL to get I:B to work, especially if it reaches the stretch tier you want: They must not be OP giants, nor sittings du- well, whales.
If you get both the capital ships system and dogfighting to work well, you’ll have the base for probably the most awesome space combat game I’ve ever seen. Can’t wait!