Awesome Night "Bug"

Haha, I got this bug too. It was pretty awesome, but no way in hell do I want it being a thing.
Kinda like how darker nights is a cool concept in PS2, everyone keeps asking for it, but the gameplay suffers because it's difficult to see anything, especially those darn Vanu.
I couldn't see any of the terrain when this was happening

Heh, looks like you haven't noticed they added an SHOW ICON DISTANCE slider last build. Best addition ever. Well apart from GW

Oh man yes please for darker nights, but maybe not that dark. And more lights to compensate.

But, options never hurt, of course.

Hopefully we'll get some darker skyboxes as well as mesmerizing psychedelic ones - they both have their appeal.
Playing in darkness really brought down the focus to the sun and planets/combat.

That bug wasn't half bad actually, if you could give more units headlights (and maybe extend the light range on them a bit) you could probably make a cool light/vs dark game mode where you have to fight to overcome the darkness as it engulfs the planet or something

I've always been a huge fan of night actually being relevant to gameplay. If you incorporate it into the mechanics, so maybe add a floodlight building to light your base at night, it could be even more awesome.

All we need now is spotlights on the laser towers, blinking lights on aircraft, tracers on the flak, air-raid search-lights, and orbital-mounted searchlights, also maybe a street lamp like building that has floodlights tinted in either team, or predefined colors (maybe different for each com?), then this game is God

The only downside to this is the lack of vision of terrain obstacles and that's quite problematic.
We need this option for videos and fun play.

Id love some tron like UI over such objects, to show the player what they should be seeing in the darkness.

Cough, cough

[ChronoCamLink] Very good gameplay with the newest build.

Had a replay like that too

Perhaps when such features were within Radar/Scout range? I agree that'd be really cool.

It wouldn't be as blanket pitch black as my screenshots in any case; there would be different shades making terrain identifiable.

OR.
OR.
GUYS. MOD IDEA.
TRON UNITS RESKINS!
The units would have lines on them that glow in the team's secondary colour, combined with the darkness, it'd be so awesome!

Black (or just darker) nights are totally something people can mod in if they want. The ambient color and brightness is defined in the planet specs, which are the .json files in the base terrain folder.

Your awesome just got UPGRADED.

TRON SKINS. YES PLEASE.

Am I missing something obvious or is that only going to be possible after initial release?
(it's probably the former)

These are some sexy screenshots.

Even though modding this aspect of the game will be possible, I think the base game should be having more contrasty day/night cycles to begin with. Most of the time I don't even notice when playing on the 'night' side of the planet.
I agree the current situation with the latest NVidia drivers is too much, but not much too much .

Ditto Please consider trying this out in the core game. A simple mod wouldn't have all the awesome unit/terrain lighting necessary.

Go to "Planetary Annihilation\stable\media\pa\terrain\".
Open up "earth.json".
Copy the contents into http://jsonlint.com/ and validate, copy the results back into the original file. (Someday I'll get William to stop deleting all of the white space for the theoretical 0.01% parsing optimization.)
Look for this block:

Code:

        "ambient": {
            "hdr_intensity": 1,
            "ldr_intensity": 1,

Change those two intensity values to 0 (zero) and you're done.
Repeat for the other .json files in that folder.

The planets will still show grey because of fog of war, but you can disable that too with the Toggle FOV keyboard command (Ctrl+j by default) or modifying the fog_of_war_resolve.fs to be darker.

You'd also need to replace the skybox with something black.

The SAO bug is just crushing the ambient lighting to black, so this change, apart from the sky, should result in exactly the same results as this bug.

And for those who want it to be darker by default, sorry, not happening. The art team likes it like it is.