View Issue Details
| ID | Project | Category | Date Submitted | Last Update | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0022699 | AI War 2 | Graphical Bug | Jan 24, 2020 8:13 am | Jan 24, 2020 10:06 am | |
| Reporter | Fluffiest | Assigned To | |||
| Severity | tweak | ||||
| Status | new | Resolution | open | ||
| Product Version | 1.309 Instigator Cheekiness | ||||
| Summary | 0022699: Beam weapons are a bit graphically unexciting | ||||
| Description | I'm not sure of the best way to fix them. My instinct would be to add some bloom, but maybe that would just be annoying? | ||||
| Tags | No tags attached. | ||||
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Which beam weapons are you referring to? There are several different scales and classes of them. The smaller ones are basically just lasers, and then step up a bit from there. The ones for the upcoming spire ships and similar are going to get a graphical overhaul in general, as those are both more rare and need to look more impressive. I guess it's kind of a graduated scale issue, in the main. Bloom in general is on everything (that's a post-processing effect), but we get bloom on a specific item by cranking the emission of color out to be in the HDR range (aka above the normal 0-1 brightness values that your monitor displays, and then by using the overage to calculate bloom amount based on pixel samples in screen space. Then everything is returned from HDR to LDR later on in the post processing stack. For most any game that isn't using someething like an HDR TV (that's more or less just a PS4 and Xbox One feature), that's the approach to HDR. The reason I bring this up is that lines are a tricky case. For performance reasons, bloom calculations can't sample every pixel on your screen; they have to sample weighted averages on downsampled screen sizes. That means that very small or thin lines tend to not look good at all with bloom, often having a pattern of bloom, no bloom, bloom, no bloom, and that's something that can be exacerbated by the distance of the line on your screen (and its size on your screen), as well as its thickness overall. Believe it or not, bloom effects that tried to process every pixel would be heavier than the entire AI for the game; it's simply a huge amount of data. That's why the downsampling approach is typically used. We're using Amplify Bloom, which has some advantages over the normal unity post processing stack (v1 or v2) or other post processing bloom tools (we own all the major ones) in that it both is able to have a bit more precision than most bloom solutions but without as much overhead (I'm not sure how they manage that), and also they have some anti-flicker protection for when the pixels are shifting around from frame to frame (such as a small line that is in motion, or when you are panning or zooming). Anyway, this is one reason why I didn't do a whole lot with bloom on the smaller beam weapons in particular. I tried it, and it looked like strange blobby pulses. With thicker beams we can get around that (for the bigger weapons), but even for them there's trouble with the blobbing effect if you're zoomed out sufficiently. We also have a fairly large contingent of players who play in a dark room and feel like things that bloom too much and too suddenly is retina-scarring, which I can sympathize with. None of which is to say I'm opposed to beefing these up, and it's on my list of things to look at for spire in general in the next couple of weeks. But this hopefully makes the problem space more clear. Thoughts welcome. |
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I was specifically thinking of the beam guardian. |
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Good to know, that's a useful reference point. Thanks! |
| Date Modified | Username | Field | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Jan 24, 2020 8:13 am | Fluffiest | New Issue | |
| Jan 24, 2020 9:38 am | Chris_McElligottPark | Note Added: 0055757 | |
| Jan 24, 2020 9:56 am | Fluffiest | Note Added: 0055758 | |
| Jan 24, 2020 10:06 am | Chris_McElligottPark | Note Added: 0055759 |
