I miss the high contrast HDR

Done, i added screenshots to the post with the Mega Bloom Mod.

Lol this mod is like a post production teams worst nightmare...

Awesome haahha.

Unleash ALL the illegal colours! MAUAHAHAHA

that is soooo gorgeous!!
but I can't have it, same with my icons the shader never worked for others but for me it works fine.

apparently we can't share shaders.

My shader coding is not as good as the developer's at uber.
I most probably made it only work with intel chipset by accident,
if i have i will try make a few revisions and see if i can make one to work with nVidia and ATI.

It is so BEAUTIFUL i don't want to hog it all to myself .. lol

What we need its lot moore ilumination,not dark what kind thoughts are that lol

contrast is what makes things shine

We need more contrast... but it shouldn't be coming from HDR. The problem with PA right now is the ambient light values are too high. (meaning if you removed the sun completely, everything would still be lit to some degree)

What needs to happen is the ambient (base light) needs to be lowered, and the sun intensity needs to be increased to create a more natural contrast. If they combine this with hdr it will look really good.

They also need to add brighter/more lights to all units when on the dark side of the planet.

I think the issue is that units don't have great headlights. If buildings and units had brighter headlights then it wouldn't matter if the night was too dark.

Also the background illumination is too bright. Sometimes I don't realise that it's night time

Make it so that the bloom increases towards the horizon of a planet.

for me night makes the planet grey/blue with very little color to it(saturation) giving a shaded night look, and day brings a vibrant color to the world, but there is no dark side of a planet, planets on the dark side are very ambient, i find it appealing, but it is very bright.

Moons arn't as ambient as planets, so maybe just adjusting the ambient values in the planet.jsons that are too bright for you may fix the ambient light OD on earth planets.

Here is another screenshot of where I think they need to go with the lighting. (notice the flood lights on the dark side of the planet)

Hopefully they will also make the solar system sky box darker as well. PA has one of the brightest 'space backgrounds' I have seen in a game.

Thats not playble map or good map,how can you like that hight rocks,or all that darkness ,i hope in future map editor we be able to take them out.
,this is the kind playble map and with good strategic view,that you can choose air,land or sea.


I can honastly say that the only point i can like the game ,its when the sun pass and stay iluminate all field ,that i agreed its beautiful view that show some good quality in ilumination all units and field.

But when sun gon all the good things lost in the shadows,hope that change in future.

@kalherine : You need to learn to read. I was talking about the lighting only. I just randomly spawned a planet to get that screenshot. I'm not in any way talking about the terrain.

If the light/darkness is handled correctly it will add to the gameplay. Currently, on the dark side of the planet, there is no contrast, making it far harder to see units. I'm suggesting that with lower ambient light (a true dark side) and giving all units nice bright lights, you will actually be able to see everything better. (due to more contrast)

I vote "Brightness slider". You know the thing you see in many games the first time you play them. Move the slider till you can barely see this icon picture thingy.

On an other note it it's quite unrealistic that you can see space in the background when you are zoomed in completely. Wouldn't an blue/grey atmosfeer colour be more appropriate as background? (I am NOT trying to start a real vs game argument.) It would only be on small planets where you can still see the edges when zoomed in that this would have any real effect.

If you are zoomed in very deep then you have a Blue/grey atmosfeer (can be smoke on lava planets, not needed on moons) and if you zoom out the background would get darker and stars would eventualy appier. Zoomed in the mood would still be visible if a bit blured and planets that are to fare away are barely visible.

EDIT: Basicly what I mean is that the "glow" that you see get stronger and blures the back ground a bit if you get in closer.

This would mean that you wouldn't see that stars in the background when zoomed in like this:

I've started monkeying around with the json files so I managed to get the darker night and stuff I wanted.

(there is a handy entry in there under "ambient", you can turn down the hdr_intensity (I used 0.7) and it makes the night way darker)

Decent headlights would be awesome.

@nix. Really cool, can you post a screen? Also, which file is this? I'd like to play around with the ambient light settings as well.

@ghost. Those are some good ideas. Would definitely help serve the 'atmosphere' of the game.

Well i dont like either.

Maybe its just me, but i feel like the HDR before or now its ruining the look of the game, the way it desatureres the colors and make them all bleak.

We need more colors in the game, not less.

But in general i think that HDR should have very dark night, and we have buildings with lights and units, and we have option to build structures that makes light as well.

In your Planetary Annihilation/pa/media/pa/terrain folder you'll see a bunch of .json files corresponding to the planet types. You can modify those values to do all sorts of things by the looks of it.

This is what I get with a tropical set to 0.7



This is what I get at 0.1



It may not look like much from that angle but the difference is greater when on night only.

The relevant settings will look something like this:


EDIT: In case it matters to anyone, those are on Uber graphics running on a Radeon 7850, so if you get different results, one or both of those are different.