Nights - I log out.

[Samboah]

I love the Everquest style darkness at night, however the lanterns have such a small light radius and the enemies don't seem affected by that darkness.

Also the nights are very long.

What I've been doing, is logging out of the game when it gets dark and log back in sometime later hoping it's daytime again.

My suggestion is to make the light radius much bigger and also not have the lantern go out ever time you fight or loot.

I think early EQ did it well, you had a torch slot or something. The other option is what I think EQ2 did, where they had much shorter nights than days.

Just my 2 cents worth.

Cheers

 

[Elloa]

Heya!
You may know this already, but in case you do not: you can go in your Video Settings, find the slider for Exposure. If you push it fully to the left, you will have much lighter night.

 

[Samboah]

Heya!
You may know this already, but in case you do not: you can go in your Video Settings, find the slider for Exposure. If you push it fully to the left, you will have much lighter night.

I've messed around with those setting a bit more and found if I move it to the LEFT (.. ie -1.00 ) it actually makes it lighter for me. I'm on a Mac. I've attached some screenshots to show the difference. Maybe the settings are reversed on the Mac for some reason. Thanks for the suggestion, it makes a big difference!

 

[Samboah]

Heya!
You may know this already, but in case you do not: you can go in your Video Settings, find the slider for Exposure. If you push it fully to the left, you will have much lighter night.

Ok sorry I realise you said LEFT to make it brighter... its just that normally an exposure adjustment of +1 makes things brighter and -1 makes things darker ... certainly on a camera it works that way... so I was a bit confused. Cheers!

 

[Undone]

The in game camera acts similarly to a real camera. The exposure settings are automatically adjusted based on the scene lighting but have a minimum and maximum clamp. Setting the Exposure Adjustment to -1 adjusts the value in which the minimum exposure is clamped.

Also note that as the in-game date moves into summer the days will be longer and the nights shorter.

 

[Samboah]

The in game camera acts similarly to a real camera. The exposure settings are automatically adjusted based on the scene lighting but have a minimum and maximum clamp. Setting the Exposure Adjustment to -1 adjusts the value in which the minimum exposure is clamped.

Also note that as the in-game date moves into summer the days will be longer and the nights shorter.

Yeah I was reading that the length changes based on season, which is cool. Now that I have the -1 set it is playable for me again at night as I can see stuff that is outside my lantern light. I really like the dark nights thing, because I was terrified by it in Everquest when I first played that, at a time when it was very difficult to find your corpse again if you died and all your gear would stay on the corpse... so if you were killed at night, it was literally a nightmare to find your stuff.

 

[Undone]

Yeah I was reading that the length changes based on season, which is cool. Now that I have the -1 set it is playable for me again at night as I can see stuff that is outside my lantern light. I really like the dark nights thing, because I was terrified by it in Everquest when I first played that, at a time when it was very difficult to find your corpse again if you died and all your gear would stay on the corpse... so if you were killed at night, it was literally a nightmare to find your stuff.

Our game has had a long history with night being too dark for some and not dark enough for others. Basically it's out of our control - most of which comes down to different monitor calibrations and such. All of which makes it difficult to design the game around really dark nights as no one wants to play staring at nothing but UI elements. In the end we just added the exposure slider to help those on darker monitors and shied away from darkness as a core mechanic as unfortunate as it is.

 

[Samboah]

Our game has had a long history with night being too dark for some and not dark enough for others. Basically it's out of our control - most of which comes down to different monitor calibrations and such. All of which makes it difficult to design the game around really dark nights as no one wants to play staring at nothing but UI elements. In the end we just added the exposure slider to help those on darker monitors and shied away from darkness as a core mechanic as unfortunate as it is.

I was actually wondering whether having a larger lantern radius has an impact on performance? The reason I say that is I don't mind not being able to see too far at night, as long as the light radius isn't too small. With the slider at -1 I actually don't really need to use a lantern, which is a bit of a shame, because I enjoy nights being a bit dangerous, but I was finding the radius was a bit small to avoid aggro when it was completely dark beyond the lantern.

 

[Undone]

I was actually wondering whether having a larger lantern radius has an impact on performance? The reason I say that is I don't mind not being able to see too far at night, as long as the light radius isn't too small. With the slider at -1 I actually don't really need to use a lantern, which is a bit of a shame, because I enjoy nights being a bit dangerous, but I was finding the radius was a bit small to avoid aggro when it was completely dark beyond the lantern.

Unfortunately lights in the game engine attempt to mimic real life, which means they mostly follow the inverse square law of 1/r^2. So in order to decently increase the perceived light range we need to crank the brightness which makes them way too bright close up (i.e. lanterns). A lot of games crank up the ambient light when you are holding a torch, which isn't all that different than what the exposure slider does - but as you can imagine that too doesn't really "fix" things as it makes the whole scene brighter.

 

[Samboah]

Unfortunately lights in the game attempt to mimic real life, which means they mostly follow the inverse square law of 1/r^2. So in order to decently increase the perceived light range we need to crank the brightness which makes them way too bright close up (i.e. lanterns). A lot of games crank up the ambient light when you are holding a torch, which isn't all that different than what the exposure slider does - but as you can imagine that too doesn't really "fix" things as it makes the whole scene brighter.

Yeah a lantern in real-life has pretty limited range. I used to make mom style burning torches when I was a kid and you had to hold them up quite high not to blind yourself and also to cast a winder light. Thanks for the explanation.

 

[zabatiz]

Ever turn your interior light on in your car at night while driving.. Its harder to see outside isnt it? Torches are nice for checking dark corners and such but try letting your eyes adjust without it. I think in most cases its easier to see without a torch on.