Darkness of ships and bloom effect intensity?

[x4000]

I guess my post above was waaaaay too long to be parse-able, which makes sense.

Things are dark because:

1. I was doing the lighting and color grading on an HDR TV.  Most monitors, even really nice ones, are not HDR.  You get a much wider color range on that, and so I could see things on it that I can't even on my very nice laptop screen.  This is basically what happens when you show an HDR image on an LDR display.

2. I'm now re-grading things on my monitor.  This makes things look slightly washed out on my HDR display, but still visible, and it looks vastly better on every other screen in general.  So it should be the best of all the various worlds.

3. But even beyond that, it got extra dark at some point because of some changes in the engine rendering pipeline that made shadow calculations different.  So things got darker without me noticing it, and so even on the HDR display it's too dark now, to an obnoxious degree.  I spend most of my time focused on the icons and it slipped past me because I didn't expect that things would change like that.

4. TLDR of the TLDR, I agree with you guys and this was a couple of levels of unintentional. 

[Sounds]

I guess my post above was waaaaay too long to be parse-able, which makes sense.

Things are dark because:

1. I was doing the lighting and color grading on an HDR TV.  Most monitors, even really nice ones, are not HDR.  You get a much wider color range on that, and so I could see things on it that I can't even on my very nice laptop screen.  This is basically what happens when you show an HDR image on an LDR display.

2. I'm now re-grading things on my monitor.  This makes things look slightly washed out on my HDR display, but still visible, and it looks vastly better on every other screen in general.  So it should be the best of all the various worlds.

3. But even beyond that, it got extra dark at some point because of some changes in the engine rendering pipeline that made shadow calculations different.  So things got darker without me noticing it, and so even on the HDR display it's too dark now, to an obnoxious degree.  I spend most of my time focused on the icons and it slipped past me because I didn't expect that things would change like that.

4. TLDR of the TLDR, I agree with you guys and this was a couple of levels of unintentional. 

All good; and I understood both posts. 

Glad I wasn't the only one seeing this. I was so surprised by the lack of posts about it, so hopefully some adjustments are on the cards. A part from myself and retina pain, this seemed like one of those off-putting issues for new players.

[Asteroid]

I checked latest SVN, and great work Chris. My first impression of the graphics was absolutely terrible, but now it looks rather good, even on planets overlaid by the "no current data" static.

I'd say job well done and time well-spent, even though it's a pity that just updating Unity can lead to a visual degradation like this.

EDIT: The only problem is that now that I want to zoom in more to look at the units, I notice more the spastic shaking a lot of them exhibit. Sorry. 

EDIT2: The icons seem blurry/pixelated when zoomed out in the SVN build, I didn't notice this before?

[x4000]

I'm not seeing the pixelated issue you mention.

As far as the rotation goes, I think we need to just make them only rotate if their movement target is a certain distance away.  That should be an easy fix for someone to slap in there, if anyone is inclined to look.

I notice also that explosions of ships don't seem to be happening now, sigh.  That's a frustrating one...

[Sounds]

Oh my goodness!!!! Why have you been hiding all this awesome detail on the ships?

Still a little dark, and a tad too much bloom, but +99.99999% improvement over the previous releases. 

Thank you so much for these changes - it means I can actually start playing the game without pain.

Hey any chance of a switch to turn off the bloom / shadows completely?

[x4000]

Glad you like it!

Turning off bloom entirely is something that would be possible, though the shots will look really strange without that on; those and explosions rely on bloom to look at all like shots or explosions.  Otherwise they'll look like strange polygon shards ala star fox on the SNES.

The shadows are trickier, as those are something that are a complex interplay of how the shaders for each ship are individually set up at this point.  Usually it's not actually shadows that are the thing that's making a ship darker, but how I've chosen to configure the metallicity or reflections or even the actual diffuse power on a ship depending on which of my custom shaders is in play.  Generally speaking if something is on the darker side it's for good reason; typically the ones that still look really dark, like fortresses, are hiding the fact that they look like absolute rear-end if you see them with a full texture brightness.  Usually because I used a texture set from something else on a model that wasn't designed for it initially.