Adding my support to SS2 being overall too dark. I should never have to strain my eyes to see stuff in a game.

Also agreeing that SS2 in its current state is not ready for release, it needs another uni worth of work i think. Theres still bugs, incomplete features, and lots of gameplay help. If the admins have a new version they need release it for us to test.

Mind that we want ambient lighting, not yet another glow on ships to make em visible
AMBIENT LIGHT!!

meh, I guess they will just pop some glows on ships anyway >.>

ambiant light "booster" is on my todo list

Mmmk
just have to say that there should be more ambient light and less light from sun.
Because atm one side of ship is completly black while other half is white/yellow.
We can't even see ship details because ships are black&white


If it's possible, ships should be lighted from top rather than from side, I wonder how would it look like if u moved suns a lot higher above ships

Also , Using a Pax is like impossible to see the ship itself , the only way to know where are you headed is that looking at your engine , which is a disturbing thing to do, causing much trouble(Visibility and unnecessary movement).

i had a go at the lights a bit, its not perfect yet, but i believe its a lot better, what do you guys think ?

You can see the impact mostly on the space blue alpha in the very high graphics (the light wasnt exactly lacking to begin with). On the other hand.. its quite obvious that medium/low lacked ambient lightning alltogether.










I didnt show low graphics because the lightning is pretty much the same between low and medium, except that due to the fact glowmap are done using shaders, the pax dont have their glow in there (yet, ill try to write some fallback stuff so that it somehow display it without the shader).

That looks a lot better, Jey. Would you be able to post a screenshot of medium graphics in a gal with no sun or colored nebula, perhaps with a dark ship like Zebu or Paximinus?

sure, heres 2 screenshots with a completly empty gal (litterally only things in here are what you see on the screenshots).

new luminosity


old luminosity

the pax is very hard to see in the dark because of its color and effects applied on it (it has a tendency to absorb any light effects i throw at it T_T), on high/very high its less of a problem due to its metallic reflection, but those effects are not available with pixel shader 2.0 (with our current code)

with a new texture that doesnt rely on environment buffer it would probably be a lot visible, but im not a graphist, doing such thing, while in my capability, is not something i can do well nor in any decent timeframe haha

Not sure if this was before:

Note the lines.

This is absolutely eye orgasmicly better.

what exactly is that screenshot ? and the lines seem to be caused by the video graphic being set at 16bit instead of 32bit. at least that would cause something similar to that. without more info i cant really tell.

This is great work Jey.