Will the new weather/lighting system fix the sky banding and purple nighttime colour?

[Mysticpuma]

Hi TFS. 

Iwe know that there is a new weather system coming and this has its own lighting, so out of curiosity, has the testing shown sky banding to be significantly reduced (a major irritation as we spend so much time up there in a flight sim) and secondly,  because it has its own lighting system will this finally firstly the purple night environment (and horrific aircraft colours) and secondly the harsh transition from night to daytime? 

 

Cheers, Mysticpuma. 

[AEthelraedUnraed]

There's gonna be a new weather system? I can't recall any Dev posts saying so. I'd be interested to hear more about it, can you perhaps link to some more info? ?

[69thSpiritus]

We'll have more info on this once we get closer to releasing it.

 

@AEthelraedUnraed

 

Yes, new cloud/weather system. 

[Jaws2002]

The patch that messed up the colors and lighting engine in general, killed the game for me.  

  CLOD had such a beautiful and well calibrated, natural light, and then came Luther, with his dirty boots to mess it all up.

 During the day, the game got heavy dark sun glasses, that darkened and desaturated everything, except the sun, witch is funny, since sun glasses supposed to tone down the blindness from the sun. The night got that purple over everything BS.

 

 

 I was soooo hoping Team Fusion will bring back the original lighting of the game, but i was, sadly, mistaken. 

 

Back when the game was released. We had the best lighting engine in flight sims and by a solid margin. Then it was all turned into a gray murky mess, during the day and a glowing purple neon during the night.

 Heartbreaking.

 

The sky banding was introduced in the same patch, because Ilya drastically reduced the resolution of all light, sky and reflection textures.

 

Here's how smooth the transition between colors in the sky was back in the original:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Edited August 13, 2020 by Jaws2002

[Jaws2002]

I had an old version of the game, that i could run after that dreaded patch and it was striking how bad the lighting was messed up, when you switched between versions. 

Unfortunately once Blitz was released, Steam killed my old version. 

 

  It's sad what turn this game took, when it had sooooo much potential, and got a second chance.

 

I just hope, when you guys implement True Sky, you have a look at their lighting engine as well, not only the clouds and weather. 

 

Look at the lighting in DCS and the new MS Flight sim for inspiration,....or go out and watch a few sunsets, but leave the sun glasses at home.

 

 

Edited August 13, 2020 by Jaws2002

[Semor76]

42 minutes ago, Jaws2002 said:

I had an old version of the game, that i could run after that dreaded patch and it was striking how bad the lighting was messed up, when you switched between versions. 

Unfortunately once Blitz was released, Steam killed my old version. 

 

  It's sad what turn this game took, when it had sooooo much potential, and got a second chance.

 

I just hope, when you guys implement True Sky, you have a look at their lighting engine as well, not only the clouds and weather. 

 

Look at the lighting in DCS and the new MS Flight sim for inspiration,....or go out and watch a few sunsets, but leave the sun glasses at home.

 

 

+100!

[peregrine7]

We can patch (to some extent) via reshade. But yeah, it does always strike me that for once my nostalgia glasses are correct. The game really did look stunning early on. Perhaps TFS can restore that natural beauty again, the same way they brought other aspects back to life.

 

Team phoenix seems more fitting to me

[Jaws2002]

1 hour ago, peregrine7 said:

We can patch (to some extent) via reshade. But yeah, it does always strike me that for once my nostalgia glasses are correct. The game really did look stunning early on. Perhaps TFS can restore that natural beauty again, the same way they brought other aspects back to life.

 

Team phoenix seems more fitting to me

 

We talked about this on ATAG forum back, after Team Fusion gave the game a second lease on life, but, from what i understood, the focus was on more pressing issues, like big bug fixes, performance improvement and restoring the functionality of the game. Unfortunately a part of that initial beauty, was the result of  rather large, high resolution textures, that had a big hit on performance. 

   The performance was increased dramatically, for mid and lower performing rigs, but the price was to rebuild the game on top of a badly butchered lighting engine. 

 

I was just looking through some of my older CLOD and DCS screenshots today and what's amazing is that CLOD had very similar lighting engine back in 2011 to today's DCS.

Look at this  screenshots, that i took with very different rigs, at different resolution, nine years apart:

 

CLOD in 2011:

 

 

 

 

DCS in 2020:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Oleg knew what he was doing and he was years ahead of anyone else.

Edited August 14, 2020 by Jaws2002

[peregrine7]

19 minutes ago, Jaws2002 said:

 

Oleg knew what he was doing and he was years ahead of anyone else.

 

Yeah, the biggest shame of IL2 CloD was that parts of it were so utterly fantastic it made everything feel lacking. But that's why TF is great, the fundamentals of this sim are beyond everything else. DCS is only just getting there.

 

So maybe, with great hope, TF can restore some of it in future along with VR.

[Jaws2002]

24 minutes ago, peregrine7 said:

 

Yeah, the biggest shame of IL2 CloD was that parts of it were so utterly fantastic it made everything feel lacking. But that's why TF is great, the fundamentals of this sim are beyond everything else. DCS is only just getting there.

 

So maybe, with great hope, TF can restore some of it in future along with VR.

 

  Well, DCS is now quite a bit more advanced than what CLOD was back then, but It took therm nine extra years. The great advantage IL-2 had back then, was that Oleg Maddox was not only a very good game designer, but also an accomplished professional Photographer and he understood how light works and knew how to put it in the game. 

His original lighting engine was really well calibrated. There were some bad colors on some of the fields on the English side of the map, but that needed map tweaking, not messing with the general lighting engine.

  Ilya knew computers, but he was clueless about how light works and why planes and the environment look how they looked. So he got in and messed the lighting engine, in order to create a localized look.  He ruined everything to create the English shitty weather, without thinking, that you do that by working on the weather engine, and not on the lighting engine.

    I hope TF makes a lot of money from Trobruk and can afford to hire a profesional to calibrate the colors of the engine. 

DCS is amazing now in this respect. Not only is the sky and weather looking stunning, the skins of planes are also reacting really well with the light based on the materials they are made from. 

Edited August 14, 2020 by Jaws2002

[kendo]

22 hours ago, Jaws2002 said:

The patch that messed up the colors and lighting engine in general, killed the game for me.  

  CLOD had such a beautiful and well calibrated, natural light, and then came Luther, with his dirty boots to mess it all up.

 During the day, the game got heavy dark sun glasses, that darkened and desaturated everything, except the sun, witch is funny, since sun glasses supposed to tone down the blindness from the sun. The night got that purple over everything BS.

 

 I was soooo hoping Team Fusion will bring back the original lighting of the game, but i was, sadly, mistaken. 

 

Back when the game was released. We had the best lighting engine in flight sims and by a solid margin. Then it was all turned into a gray murky mess, during the day and a glowing purple neon during the night.

 Heartbreaking.

 

The sky banding was introduced in the same patch, because Ilya drastically reduced the resolution of all light, sky and reflection textures.

 

Here's how smooth the transition between colors in the sky was back in the original:

 

Really interesting to see the quality of those early screens. I hope they can get things back to something approaching that. If that happens, the new weather system is as good as it sounds,  and the new 4k map textures come off i may even buy back in again.

 

Incidentally, I think that BoX would also benefit from a lighting revamp. i'm hoping it is one of the things on the agenda after the move to deferred shading. i have high hopes that it will be part of the 'big leap forward visually' that Han referred to.

 

[Blitzen]

I can only add at 2200 it is a very black starless sky with a very dim moon....very black.