• sylver_dragon@lemmy.world
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    3 months 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.

  • finitebanjo@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    “It’s a bit technical,” begins Birdwell, "but the simple version is that graphics cards at the time always stored RGB textures and even displayed everything as non linear intensities, meaning that an 8 bit RGB value of 128 encodes a pixel that’s about 22% as bright as a value of 255, but the graphics hardware was doing lighting calculations as though everything was linear.

    “The net result was that lighting always looked off. If you were trying to shade something that was curved, the dimming due to the surface angle aiming away from the light source would get darker way too quickly. Just like the example above, something that was supposed to end up looking 50% as bright as full intensity ended up looking only 22% as bright on the display. It looked very unnatural, instead of a nice curve everything was shaded way too extreme, rounded shapes looked oddly exaggerated and there wasn’t any way to get things to work in the general case.”

    • gazter@aussie.zone
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      3 months ago

      Made harder by brightness being perceived non - linearly. We can detect a change in brightness much easier in a dark area than a light- if the RGB value is 10%, and shifts to 15%, we’ll notice it. But if it’s 80% and shifts to 85%, we probably won’t.

  • ruk_n_rul@monyet.cc
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    3 months 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