Ken Birdwell was all about "getting the lighting right."
  • ruk_n_rul@monyet.ccEnglish
    11·
    14 days ago

    It’s impressive how many times Valve goes “fine, I’ll do it myself”:

    • This
    • FPS becoming stale and called murder hallways
    • Video games having piss poor support in Linux

    to list but very few

  • sylver_dragon@lemmy.worldEnglish
    7·
    14 days ago

    Now, can we fix flashlights in games such that we don’t get a well defined circle of lit area surrounded by completely a black environment? Light doesn’t work that way, it bounces and scatters, meaning that a room with a light in it should almost never be completely dark. I always end up ignoring the “adjust the gamma until some wiggle is just visible” setup pages and just blow the gamma out until I can actually see a reasonable amount in the dark areas.

    Yes, really dark places should be really dark. But, once you add a light to the situation, they should be a lot less dark.

    • moody@lemmings.worldEnglish
      5·
      14 days ago

      Now, can we fix flashlights in games such that we don’t get a well defined circle of lit area surrounded by completely a black environment?

      Sure, we can do that, but we won’t because of the narrative and functional in-game purpose of the flashlight. It’s not meant to be realistic, it’s meant to make the game feel a specific way.

      • Cyrus Draegur@lemm.eeEnglish
        1·
        14 days ago

        It’s also why a flashlight may be able to run for dozens of hours straight on a single battery but in video games it’ll die in minutes if not seconds. Realism is unfair. Also the same reason why nuclear reactors in video games are always dangerous. Because representing them realistically would be boring to the average adrenaline junkie “gamer”.

    • IrateAnteater@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      5·
      14 days ago

      You just described ray tracing. The problem is, it’s incredibly computationally expensive. That’s why DLSS and FSR were created to try and make up for the slow framerates.

        • IrateAnteater@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          3·
          14 days ago

          Not in an ideal world. Ray tracing is how light actually works in real life. Everything we do with global illumination right now is a compromised workaround, since doing a lifelike amount of ray tracing in real time, at reasonable framerates, is still to much for our hardware.

          • krashmo@lemmy.worldEnglish
            1·
            14 days ago

            Nothing about 3D animation is ideal. It’s all about reasonable approximations. Needing to build better GPUs to support tracing individual photons is insane when you could just slightly increase ambient lighting in the area of a light source.

      • Cyrus Draegur@lemm.eeEnglish
        1·
        14 days ago

        I’ve seen an awesome “kludge” method where, instead of simulating billions of photons bouncing in billions of directions off every surface in the entire world, they are taking extremely low resolution cube map snapshots from the perspective of surfaces on a “one per square(area)” basis once every couple frames and blending between them over distance to inform the diffuse lighting of a scene as if it were ambient light mapping rather than direct light. Which is cool because not only can it represent the brightness of emissive textures, but it also makes it less necessary to manually fill scenes with manually placed key lights, fill lights, and backlights.

  • Boozilla@lemmy.worldEnglish
    3·
    14 days ago

    Interesting read.

    Now can somebody please fix the horrible volume sliders on everything.

    • borari@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      2·
      14 days ago

      I just max all the volume sliders and use voicemeeter to control the volume levels of the different audio sinks. Although I guess that doesn’t help if you’re trying to leave game audio at max volume but lower music or something.