Paddy have you noticed how hard it is to get the nights to look right? I don't think anyone has really nailed it yet.
It's so easy to make it too light and dull or just too dark and unplayable. In real life you can see quite a lot once your eyes adapt them selfs to the dark. I may have done some real life beta testing on the subject
Well having spent years in the army I have seen and spent lots of time in the dark lol, and yes unless its completely covered by cloud or your in cover like trees buildings etc you can see very well at night.
I think the problem with ENB and screen shots is everybody's Monitor and graphics card is different so for me it looks perfect but for someone else its very dark or maybe to bright. My ENB is setup more towards weather and scenery but unfortunately it wont look right for everyone, this is from my latest ENB that's still work in progress I made it a little darker because people said my last ENB was to light at night lol so yeah its tricky mate .Ps I can lend you an army issue tent if you want to do some testing lol .
The monitor issue is way worse than you think, not only does it matter like you said what monitor and graphics card people use, there are a number of other factors in play:
A. Available ambient light in the room (nothing can be done about this one and it has by far the biggest effect, totally changes the way an image looks because the rooms ambient light affects your eye adaption)
B. Calibration
C. Whether or not you are playing on the monitors native resolution.... as I have noticed lately because my sound card broke and I now have to use 1080p so I can get some sound out of the computer via HDMI...grrr. The image looks no where near as black because of all the scaling.
D. We are still using LCD's(LED's are LCD's they still block light to create blacks instead of just shutting the light off)..... Blacks are really dark grey... OLED's cant get here soon enough.
so...
What I was really thinking about was that harsh shimmering light that you get at nights because the moon is really a spot light. I thought I actually figured out how to do it in the CK, the "receive bloom threshold" value under imagespaces lets you tune if a scene should look more "wet" (lower value) or "dry and dusty" (higher value). But it only works like that when its not night.. grrr. This could actually be that it is working but the current display tech just can't show it properly without mushing it all up.
I'm using this monitor mate, the new AMVA+ panels are great and have amazing blacks too http://www.iiyama.com/gl_en/products/prolite-xb2783hsu-b1dp/, get yourself one until OLED is affordable lol
Yeah that's a great monitor mate, I'm pretty up to date atm maybe a CPU upgrade next year but otherwise as long as something doesn't go wrong I'm ok lol .
8 comments
It's so easy to make it too light and dull or just too dark and unplayable. In real life you can see quite a lot once your eyes adapt them selfs to the dark. I may have done some real life beta testing on the subject
I think the problem with ENB and screen shots is everybody's Monitor and graphics card is different so for me it looks perfect but for someone else its very dark or maybe to bright. My ENB is setup more towards weather and scenery but unfortunately it wont look right for everyone, this is from my latest ENB that's still work in progress I made it a little darker because people said my last ENB was to light at night lol so yeah its tricky mate
A. Available ambient light in the room (nothing can be done about this one and it has by far the biggest effect, totally changes the way an image looks because the rooms ambient light affects your eye adaption)
B. Calibration
C. Whether or not you are playing on the monitors native resolution.... as I have noticed lately because my sound card broke and I now have to use 1080p so I can get some sound out of the computer via HDMI...grrr. The image looks no where near as black because of all the scaling.
D. We are still using LCD's(LED's are LCD's they still block light to create blacks instead of just shutting the light off)..... Blacks are really dark grey... OLED's cant get here soon enough.
so...
What I was really thinking about was that harsh shimmering light that you get at nights because the moon is really a spot light. I thought I actually figured out how to do it in the CK, the "receive bloom threshold" value under imagespaces lets you tune if a scene should look more "wet" (lower value) or "dry and dusty" (higher value). But it only works like that when its not night.. grrr. This could actually be that it is working but the current display tech just can't show it properly without mushing it all up.
I'll keep the tent in mind LOL
I'm all set, now I just need the hardware to do it justice