Lighting Tweaking (dev branch)

[DaRkL3AD3R 1]

I don't want to be annoying but I thought it would be interesting too see how that same place looks in the stable release right now.

That's not a really fair comparison. Your dynamic lights are set to low here, that's why it looks so bad. If I could bother you with a request, do another video with dynamic lights set to ultra on the stable builds and we can see the true difference.

[rebelvg 281]

Textures and Clouds on High, everything else is on Normal.

The main difference now is that you see light from greater distances than in stable release.

There is no need for video, I can show that on a screenshots. Give me a sec.

[DaRkL3AD3R 1]

Textures and Clouds on High, everything else is on Normal.

The main difference now is that you see light from greater distances than in stable release.

There is no need for video, I can show that on a screenshots. Give me a sec.

Thanks mate.

Also I have yet to comment on today's dev build so I feel I should.

-Overall heading in the right direction now. Lighting has been toned down slightly, still just a bit too bright in some spots (namely Agia Marina) but overall looks good

-Performance is back to normal largely.

-Waiting on the rest of the lights and materials to be adjusted for the new changes

Today's build is a good step finally. First build that is really satisfactory since the lighting changes took place back on 4/17. Looking forward to what the devs can work up for the rest of the week.

[NeuroFunker 11]

And how does anyone NOT know what the performance problem is? It's quite clear. When they first broke night lighting, and all the lights were off, my performance was exactly equivalent to day time. Then they made Friday's dev patch with super bright night lighting and now everyones performance tanks hard. And we wonder what the problem is!? :rolleyes:

is it me, or you talking totally obvious things?

[rebelvg 281]

Time is set to 00:15.

First one - Ultra Dynamic Lights (changes number of light sources, not distance, my guess is that now light view distance is equivalent to overall view distance), all other on High.

http://rghost.net/45650563/image.png

Second one - Same settings, new dev build.

http://rghost.net/45650569/image.png

Edited April 29, 2013 by rebelvg

[DaRkL3AD3R 1]

is it me, or you talking totally obvious things?

Talking about totally obvious things that people were scratching their heads over. It's totally clear the problem with performance was the dynamic lighting. Just saying it in a slightly sarcastic tone to point out how duh it is.

Time is set to 00:15.

First one - Ultra Dynamic Lights (changes number of light sources, not distance, my guess is that now light view distance is equivalent to overall view distance), all other on High.

http://rghost.net/45650563/image.png

Second one - Same settings, new dev build.

http://rghost.net/45650569/image.png

You're right rebel, I checked it again on my alpha and it does look like that on stable builds. When you get a bit closer the issues disappear but it definitely looks bad.

So far I am pretty happy with the overall improvements on the dev build right now. I just can't wait till they get to all the other lights and materials so we can see it all functioning properly in one place.

Edited April 29, 2013 by DaRkL3AD3R

[rebelvg 281]

Time is set to 00:15.

First one - Ultra Dynamic Lights (changes number of light sources, not distance, my guess is that now light view distance is equivalent to overall view distance), all other on High.

http://rghost.net/45650563/image.png

Second one - Same settings, new dev build.

http://rghost.net/45650569/image.png

And here is the difference from the ground.

First one.

http://rghost.net/45651074/image.png

Second one.

http://rghost.net/45651077/image.png

[old_painless 182]

Good pictures, rebelvg. They also highlight that shadows are missing, as someone else also pointed out. Especially apparent in the Dev build images with the intense "floodlights" but even so no shadows (not a setting on your side, is it ?)

The shadows would really make the scene come alive

[rebelvg 281]

Good pictures, rebelvg. They also highlight that shadows are missing, as someone else also pointed out. Especially apparent in the Dev build images with the intense "floodlights" but even so no shadows (not a setting on your side, is it ?)

The shadows would really make the scene come alive

There is a great feedback by some guy about night shadows. Check out his comparison screenshots of what it would look like if there were night shadows. Looks awesome! It's definitely an engine side right now. So vote it up!

http://feedback.arma3.com/view.php?id=7885

[DaRkL3AD3R 1]

There is a great feedback by some guy about night shadows. Check out his comparison screenshots of what it would look like if there were night shadows. Looks awesome! It's definitely an engine side right now. So vote it up!

http://feedback.arma3.com/view.php?id=7885

New pictures really do show how we need a compromise between the stable build and the current dev build in terms of brightness. The old ones are too dim, but the new ones are way over blown.

Also, as good as it would look to have dynamic shadows from those lights, from a developer side point please god no. We are already seeing horrible dynamic lighting performance with no shadows being cast. If they implement even a single sided shadow volume per dynamic light, performance would tank into the single digits AND you would get horrible shadow thrashing. It's not doable with current tech. Not even close.

[MaXyM 10]

Sorry for late answer.

I just found this picture in the first post of this thread:

I would like to make a note about what is reflected in the water. In my opinion it is not realistic or even close to. It might be interpreted in the first row being nice, but anyone who just stop for a minute and thing about it, find it fake.

Reflection is nothing less nothing more but image reflected by the "mirror". In our case water should work like the mirror. But it doesn't reflect appearance of sky.

It's also the reason why such wide sun reflection in the water cannot be justified on this pictire. It might appear this way only if sky around the sun were very bright (in diameter corresponding with reflection width)

In other words it looks like sky and sea was taken from different pictures.

Please check google using 'sunset/sunrise sea' tags.

Hope those notes will influence development making result more realistic.

best regards.

Edited April 29, 2013 by MaXyM

[old_painless 182]

New pictures really do show how we need a compromise between the stable build and the current dev build in terms of brightness. The old ones are too dim, but the new ones are way over blown.

Also, as good as it would look to have dynamic shadows from those lights, from a developer side point please god no. We are already seeing horrible dynamic lighting performance with no shadows being cast. If they implement even a single sided shadow volume per dynamic light, performance would tank into the single digits AND you would get horrible shadow thrashing. It's not doable with current tech. Not even close.

Undoable, really? I thought the GPU hardware had come further. Oh well, but it still looks fake, as in nice but fake, that the night lights do not cast any shadows, especially at that intensity.

Out of curiousity, what makes the daytime shadows work and perform? Is that because the sun is the one and only source of light so not many calculations ?

[Zorg_DK 10]

I like the new lightning changes, street lamps should be a little less strong though.

Edited April 30, 2013 by Zorg_DK
spelling

[bad benson 1733]

street lambs

yea street lambs look way to strong http://www.globalanimal.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/happy-lamb-jumping-in-street.jpg

;) sorry couldn't resist.

Edited April 29, 2013 by Bad Benson

[tpw 2315]

I'm not a 3D engine coder so have no idea of how much of a rewrite and how much of a performance hit would be required to implement dynamic shadows, although I assume it would be major on both counts. Like everything else in Arma, it's a tradeoff between realism/immersion and performance. A properly implemented system whereby users could configure dynamic lighting and shadows (distance, number of sources etc) to suit their hardware would be brilliant. The immersion and atmosphere of games such as Metro2033 which implement it well is amazing (as is the load on the CPU and GPU!)

Unfortunately the more realistic a game gets, the more glaring are the areas where the realism is compromised. Lights without shadows is just about top of the list for me.

[bad benson 1733]

i remember that in some early videos one of the BI guys said that dynamic shadows won't be implemented for performance reasons. i really wish they would though. it would improve the visuals a lot additional to the general lighting updates. it's basically the only thing that breaks arma's near photorealism in some situations.

i hope they at least try to make it happen for a very small radius. i think though that it's one of those features like physX it could be implemented but it would mean to halt everything else and update the engine again.

[DaRkL3AD3R 1]

Undoable, really? I thought the GPU hardware had come further. Oh well, but it still looks fake, as in nice but fake, that the night lights do not cast any shadows, especially at that intensity.

Out of curiousity, what makes the daytime shadows work and perform? Is that because the sun is the one and only source of light so not many calculations ?

Unfortunately yes it is not doable on today's hardware. The reason the sun is able to cast dynamic shadows on everything is due to something called cascaded shadow maps. It means depending on the distance from the camera perspective and the angle it's rendered at, shadows drop quality more and more until it fades into max distance.

Also the sun is really one dynamic lighting source. Imagine having to calculate that level of shadow intensity on ALL dynamic lights from lamp posts etc. It's not doable. Well, you could force it but it would run horribly and look like a mess of corrupt shadows etc.

[MaXyM 10]

Also the sun is really one dynamic lighting source. Imagine having to calculate that level of shadow intensity on ALL dynamic lights from lamp posts etc. It's not doable. Well, you could force it but it would run horribly and look like a mess of corrupt shadows etc.

Hmm. I'm quite sure it must not be true for deferred rendering

Edited April 29, 2013 by MaXyM

[DaRkL3AD3R 1]

Hmm. I'm quite sure it must not be true for deferred rendering

Cryengine 3 uses deferred lighting and even in that engine it's impossible to setup dozens of shadow casting dynamic lights within a small area. It causes severe shadow pool thrashing and performance plummets. Dynamic lighting (and shadowing) is still to this day the most resource intensive aspect of rendering rasterized 3D graphics. Especially when you run with high resolution shadow maps. There are few things more difficult to process than lighting.

Believe me, I'd love to have dynamic shadows in town as it would really add to the visual appeal, but we're just not quite there yet.

On the flip side don't worry. Everyone among us on these forums is likely to see major advancements in rendering power and capabilities within their lifetime. Look back 20 years to the good old days of gaming. We had side scrolling 2D graphics with 8 bit color modes. Now we're running full stereoscopic 3D graphics with realtime shadows day/night cycles and massive levels. All at super high definition resolutions. I'm sure in the next 20 years things will be so advanced we'll be laughing at these graphics in Arma 3 :)

[MaXyM 10]

true :)

[maddogx 13]

There is a great feedback by some guy about night shadows. Check out his comparison screenshots of what it would look like if there were night shadows. Looks awesome! It's definitely an engine side right now. So vote it up!

http://feedback.arma3.com/view.php?id=7885

NodUnit's ticket was unfortunately a duplicate, but I couldn't let his amazing screenshot touch-ups go to waste so I took the liberty of transferring them to #4180. Up-vote there for dynamic shadows! ;)

[old_painless 182]

I could live without dynamic shadows since it would be such a performance hog.

However, it worries me a bit more about the flashlight-shining-through-walls issue, perhaps that could be fixed more easily?

[DaRkL3AD3R 1]

I could live without dynamic shadows since it would be such a performance hog.

However, it worries me a bit more about the flashlight-shining-through-walls issue, perhaps that could be fixed more easily?

Flashlights casting shadows and subsequently not going through walls is a much more realistic possibility. It's a simple 90 degrees or less shadow casting cone of light, pretty manageable.

[nodunit 397]

NodUnit's ticket was unfortunately a duplicate, but I couldn't let his amazing screenshot touch-ups go to waste so I took the liberty of transferring them to #4180. Up-vote there for dynamic shadows! ;)

Thank you.

When I think dynamic shadows I mean it for flash lights and vehicle lights as well, essentially all things that cast light..perhaps I misunderstand what a dynamic light is? I thought a light or vehicle light would be the most dynamic of them all. The images I modified used a shadow from one single light source rather than having the light sources diffusing one another. The idea was the same systen dynamic lights use IE rendering shadows based on setting within the radius of the player rather than all at once.

When I think of lights the one I keep coming back to is the aircraft carrier in Crysis 1, filled with lights yet very few actually cast shadows. None of the green on the deck did (which nobody seemed to notice) and there was only one in the interior rooms (one was all they needed).

If you were to go into the editor and turn shadows on for all lights then you'd see a tank in the frame rate whereas the odd one or two made little difference performance wise. Please note I am merely comparing concepts, not the games in and of themselves.) And I realise that to that degree my arguement is rather weak considering they used occlusion culling techniques (which for the sake of performance I made a ticket for here http://feedback.arma3.com/view.php?id=7907 ) which meant that the light would not seep out and the surrounding lights would not seep in. (which I imagine would be different from the proposal)

The new shadows for Arma 3 are less performance intense on ultra than the very highest on Arma 2 and Arma 3's lights are now much better in performance (high gives me the same fps as daytime, I'd gladly set it to standard if it meant they would project shadows) then why not at least attempt to combine the two for but one patch and see how things go? It could go awful, it could go better than expected.

In the end it would be optional for the user to subject theirself, just the same as going between the various post processing settings and watching your fps tank 10-20+fps.

Edited April 30, 2013 by NodUnit

[bad benson 1733]

i remember how in old games environmental shadows were baked into the level but still calculated once according to the light source they were caused by. i wonder if a compromise would be possible like for example having something like it for streetlights that is kind of static and gets just blended out into daytime. what i mean is like only considering static objects like houses but ignoring dynamic ones like characters and vehicles. this would also exclude moving lights like flashlights and car head lights.

so we could have the shadows that NodUnit created there without having actual dynamic lights. the only problem i see is if a house gets destroyed and thus changes its shape.