Goonhub
06-30-2022, 04:38 PM
Old lighting was mostly less accessible. With the current system, anything that has zero lighting (including the ring of light all characters have around them as a lightning source) is #000000 black. This means that no matter *what* you set your monitor's gamma to, you won't ever be sent any visual details of things in "complete darkness". It's all the way dark. Old darkness basically dimmed everything, so you totally could just turn up your monitor to cheat it, and would gain a real mechanical advantage if you could just see better in the dark areas, which encouraged people to strain their eyes picking apart barely visible detail.
New system isn't perfect, as, like you've said, just *barely* visible things are quite difficult to see, but still possible. But the older lighting where everything was *kind of* visible in the dark was much, much worse for it. Some solutions could be brightening up the vision ring around players (that only you yourself ever see) or making very very dim lighting render as fullblack as well. Maybe both? Lightning should be binary: you either see it and it's lit, or you don't. Also should still look good. Seems like hard work!
To illustrate my point I opened a local instance of the game and broke all the lights in a maint hallway on Atlas. Then, I screenshotted it and opened it up in Aseprite. Using the color dropper, it's very clear to see that areas that are full-dark.
![[Image: unknown.png]](https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/799118122899996754/992224222048952371/unknown.png)
The highlighted dark area isn't an accessibility option, everyone sees the same thing in it: nothing. If you turn your brightness you'll see a greyer black, not what's "actually there". And when I say old darkness, I mean from like two years ago. Not old old darkness with the grid-based lighting. (obviously?)
New system isn't perfect, as, like you've said, just *barely* visible things are quite difficult to see, but still possible. But the older lighting where everything was *kind of* visible in the dark was much, much worse for it. Some solutions could be brightening up the vision ring around players (that only you yourself ever see) or making very very dim lighting render as fullblack as well. Maybe both? Lightning should be binary: you either see it and it's lit, or you don't. Also should still look good. Seems like hard work!
To illustrate my point I opened a local instance of the game and broke all the lights in a maint hallway on Atlas. Then, I screenshotted it and opened it up in Aseprite. Using the color dropper, it's very clear to see that areas that are full-dark.
The highlighted dark area isn't an accessibility option, everyone sees the same thing in it: nothing. If you turn your brightness you'll see a greyer black, not what's "actually there". And when I say old darkness, I mean from like two years ago. Not old old darkness with the grid-based lighting. (obviously?)