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Visual Upgrade – Feedback

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Agree, Altis and Stratis look rubbish now compared to how it was before the latest graphical update, they only updated the graphics to make Tanoa look tropical and bright looking, but it has made all other maps look like crap and not real looking at all, and changing settings what ever you do, cant get the realistic look back it had before.

I my opinion they look better with the graphical update, hope to see more improvements to the graphics in the future :)

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I my opinion they look better with the graphical update, hope to see more improvements to the graphics in the future :)

Agree, before VU, there was some like fog on the picture, like you put some cover on the camera, some shade or sunglasses. Now image is more clear.

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I would give my left nut for an Ambient Occlusion slider. If you pop in a VR soldier (one of the neon ones), disable AI on him, turn on HDAO Low and then take a look at the area where his arm is close to the body, it's way too dark. Low in this case seems to refer to the quality, not the darkness. I will post a screenshot of what I mean when I get home.

 

I wish I knew how to do shaders because I would correct this problem myself but sadly this is outside of my area of expertise.

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several page back I posted something in relation to visual upgrade vs Altis/Stratis ... it went sort of ignored

so remember while I can't promise IF, WHEN and WHAT will be adjusted ... it's WIP and we will 'try to address' those 'issues' ...

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Agree, Altis and Stratis look rubbish now compared to how it was before the latest graphical update, they only updated the graphics to make Tanoa look tropical and bright looking, but it has made all other maps look like crap and not real looking at all, and changing settings what ever you do, cant get the realistic look back it had before.

 

For myself, I never really got into the original Arma 3 maps (stratis,Altis), so it may be because of my lack of affection for those maps that I did not notice the difference - But, I sure have been seeing the difference on the ported Arma 2 maps - and honestly I feel the same way about the Arma 2 maps from Cup in the way they look now as you feel about Stratis and Altis. I just re-installed the game after a month or so break, and after trotting around on Utes - one of my favorite maps - I no longer am inspired like I was to carry on with my mission (over a year invested in it) simply because the environment just looks overall abnormal, with town and base areas having some objects so bright it's crazy. (I am aware of the fact that the Cup team has been working more at trying to fix the lighting problem). So, for each person that plays primarily on certain maps - whether they be official Arma 3 maps or not - if those maps have been damaged enough at least in the eyes of those players to no longer be enjoyable to play on, then a real possibility is that these people may go on to other games.

 

With a game that is known for its modded content to be a big feature, it seems like quite a strange decision to put so much focus into just one Jungle map while allowing the potential for so many other maps to be damaged by this focus.

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I am one of the Altis/Stratis fans. The other day I discovered some parameters that - at least for me - made some sense of my feelings about the lighting. These findings may also apply to other islands.

 

- Some have mentioned already Ambient occlusion. When I turn it totally off, it alleviated one of my gripes, namely that the Islands seem to have some kind of instagram filter over it, making the picture 'harsher', with too much dark, washing away details adding flat dark colour. You can even see it in the ocean waves on Tanoa, so I think Tanoa can be improved in this area as well. As AO is about adding shadows / darkness, this makes sense.

 

- I am so desperate for lighting options I have fiddled around with my monitor color settings a lot, meaning that I have to change my monitor settings each time I play Arma! (for now I just play only on Tanoa). I did discover that my monitor has built in cool/normal/warm tone maps. When I put it from 'normal' to 'warm' Altis and Stratis got a lot of the old look back! This mode uses RGB 50/46/23 % values. So I hope the color tone will be adjusted or can be modded for Altis/Stratis.

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I did discover that my monitor has built in cool/normal/warm tone maps. When I put it from 'normal' to 'warm' Altis and Stratis got a lot of the old look back! This mode uses RGB 50/46/23 % values. So I hope the color tone will be adjusted or can be modded for Altis/Stratis.

Use Postprocess color in A3 graphic options... it's part of the visual upgrade.

 

 

With a game that is known for its modded content to be a big feature, it seems like quite a strange decision to put so much focus into just one Jungle map while allowing the potential for so many other maps to be damaged by this focus.

Can we finally stop repeating this BS? CUP updated their lighting configs to new standard, it looks way better now. Should A3 development stop improving just because a few people made a mod and are refusing to update it? It's happened time and time again with sounds, weapons, vehicles. Now we have ONE time where maps need to be updated. Get over it.

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Know what is wrong with this photo? Shadow of Ural is missing. But there is no whadow on this weather at all. I wonder why there is no shadow on cloudy weather. Developers, is this bug, or some intented "anomally"? I live in climat, where shadows on cloudy weather are something rather normal :P 13730870_592677477577053_485788545474255

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Use Postprocess color in A3 graphic options... it's part of the visual upgrade.

 

Can you tell me how to set the RGB values to respectively 50/46/23% with the Postprocess color options? No? That's because these options are NOT part of the visual upgrade.

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Can we finally stop repeating this BS? CUP updated their lighting configs to new standard, it looks way better now. Should A3 development stop improving just because a few people made a mod and are refusing to update it? It's happened time and time again with sounds, weapons, vehicles. Now we have ONE time where maps need to be updated. Get over it.

 

"Can we finally stop repeating this BS? "

 

Who's we? You mean you?

 

 

"CUP updated their lighting configs to new standard, it looks way better now."

 

The lighting is still very messed up, and if you actually look at the Cup Terrains thread, there *are* recent images showing what things look like currently, and what they are in the process of trying to implement -

 

Posted recently by one of the Cup team members regarding the current state of things in the Cup Terrains thread :

 

Upcoming CUP update (hopefully) deals with the overly bright white colors and some oversaturation on european maps.

 

1.2.0:

http://i.imgur.com/Ik5Cq8C.jpg

 

Upcoming:

http://i.imgur.com/FecsPXh.jpg

 

They are also trying to work out night time lighting problems as well.

 

 

 

" just because a few people made a mod and are refusing to update it?"

 

A few people?

 

Try 25 or so CUP team members total.

 

 

Refusing to update it?

 

If you follow the Cup Terrains topic, they have been trying to fix the stuff for like over a month since the visuals got wrecked on the maps.

 

 

 

" Get over it."

 

Nice attitude.

 

You know what I get tired of? Apart from rude posts like the one I responded to, the attitude that floats around that indicates an 'expectancy' of modders to fix their hard work for free when Bis breaks the stuff, that content often being stuff that tons of people enjoy for free at that, and ironically the game company directly benefits financially from such great quality modded content as well. To me, when I see that sense of entitlement at times, it comes across as so ungrateful and completely ignorant to what kind of work and time these modders really put into this stuff.

 

 

Lastly, if an entire team of people are having difficulty trying to get the lighting correct for a set of maps due to the "visual Upgrade", I wonder how lone individuals with a map or two are going to pull it off?

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Developers, is this bug, or some intented "anomally"? I live in climat, where shadows on cloudy weather are something rather normal :P

If you mean by shadows that the characters should cast shadows on the ground in cloudy weather, then nope that's not how it should be. Shadows don't appear on cloudy weather if there's altostratus or something similar thick blocking the sun. Under the car there should be some ambient occlusion but it's missing in the game.

 

In cloudy weather there should be only ambient occlusion type of shadows, not something that's cast directly by the sun. But that also depends on how much the clouds block the sun.

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in cloudy weather with 100% overcast there are no stencil (sharp) shadows. But casting dynamic AO is propably too tricky. For example in interiors it could end up beeing way too dark and also performance intensive. (Current AO tech is screens-space if i got that right).

 

Just to give you an idea, creating an Ambient Occlusion map via true raycasting in good quality for weapons (2048² image)  can take 10-30 minutes of raw calculation (100% cpu load). (depending on setting and model of course).

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What if there was a system which used something like https://community.bistudio.com/wiki/Geometric_Occludersto determine where to and not to cast more AO... take for example in rainy weather there is some sort of filter that spreads and strengthens AO values where the geometry would not be present, so basically if in geometry then normal AO, if not in geometry then amplify.

Of course there are multiple problems, the first immediate I can think of is that the geometry must encase the structures interior and parts that it shouldn't be stronger....there is potential for less FPS by amplifying the AO...and of course the different techniques would yield varying results, possibly to a horrific level. 

A perhaps less intense concept would be using a deformable mesh to cast a shadow, essentially we're dealing with shadow maps and assigning a texture to a flat plane undernear a vehicle that would show up more and more the further in we get to max overcast.   Of course this immediately presents issues with various types of terrain, meaning it needs to have some sort of fluid snapping feature, and how knows how much CPU that needs....of course that could be evicted but its might lead to moments where its clipping into some of the terrain.

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in cloudy weather with 100% overcast there are no stencil (sharp) shadows. But casting dynamic AO is propably too tricky. For example in interiors it could end up beeing way too dark and also performance intensive. (Current AO tech is screens-space if i got that right).

 

Just to give you an idea, creating an Ambient Occlusion map via true raycasting in good quality for weapons (2048² image)  can take 10-30 minutes of raw calculation (100% cpu load). (depending on setting and model of course)

Guys, so this truck in the bacground look natural too you?

This is real photo:

13781814_592677467577054_809532764410515

haps less intense concept would be using a deformable mesh to cast a shadow, essentially we're dealing with shadow maps and assigning a texture to a flat plane undernear a vehicle that would show up more and more the further in we get to max overcast.   Of course this immediately presents issues with various types of terrain, meaning it needs to have some sort of fluid snapping feature, and how knows how much CPU that needs....of course that could be evicted but its might lead to moments where its clipping into some of the terrain.

Do you rmember GTA 3, VC, SA shadows (static) under vehicles? There should be static shadows like thos in GTA when its clouddy.

Or here http://media.moddb.com/images/mods/1/28/27269/auto/ZZbwQrN.png

Something like SSAO is needed  vehicles.

And for anyone complaining about lightings :

https://forums.bistudio.com/topic/169067-arma-3-lighting-alpha-vs-final-version/

People really wanted that change (Nights).

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sense of entitlement at times

This is not about entitlement (in my case anyway). It's about the realisation that for certain improvements and new features you need to rework stuff. And i'm tired of people moaning how "BI breaks things" and what a "great tragedy this is to the modding community" shortterm when they introduce new features. If you want improvements you have to pay the price. And i DO want improvements, even if that means i must update my work. You know how many times i had to rework my PhysX config for my vehicles due to BI implementing updated PhysX Libraries? Must be about 4 times by now. Same could be said about sound configs. The lighting before was bluntly shit, you couldnt have told the difference between plastic, metal or glass. It looked all the same. And colors where affected, so that 2 different colors in the texture looked exactly the same ingame. Now that is fixed. Configs now need to be updated. And also materials that where inconsistent and "wrong" to begin with made proper.

Same happened with sounds a while back if you remember? People demanding to roll back the old sound configs, how it breaks soundmods, yada yada. Strangely, they have all gone silent by now...

 

Guys, so this truck in the bacground look natural too you?

I said stencil shadows (SHARP shadows). The shadows are NOT sharp on this truck, they are soft. Something that is difficult to achieve technically in games (like i said). SSAO does NOT deliver full scene shadows. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screen_space_ambient_occlusion

Nobody disputes that soft shadowing technique is needed. If it was very easy to do we would have it already. And you can stop posting RL pictures now, we have eyes and live on this world too.

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I said stencil shadows (SHARP shadows). The shadows are NOT sharp on this truck, they are soft. Something that is difficult to achieve technically in games (like i said). SSAO does NOT deliver full scene shadows. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screen_space_ambient_occlusion

Nobody disputes that soft shadowing technique is needed. If it was very easy to do we would have it already. And you can stop posting RL pictures now, we have eyes and live on this world too.

OK, just wanted to make sure, beacuse from some post i wasnt sure....

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This is not about entitlement (in my case anyway). It's about the realisation that for certain improvements and new features you need to rework stuff. And i'm tired of people moaning how "BI breaks things" and what a "great tragedy this is to the modding community" shortterm when they introduce new features. If you want improvements you have to pay the price. And i DO want improvements, even if that means i must update my work. You know how many times i had to rework my PhysX config for my vehicles due to BI implementing updated PhysX Libraries? Must be about 4 times by now. Same could be said about sound configs. The lighting before was bluntly shit, you couldnt have told the difference between plastic, metal or glass. It looked all the same. And colors where affected, so that 2 different colors in the texture looked exactly the same ingame. Now that is fixed. Configs now need to be updated. And also materials that where inconsistent and "wrong" to begin with made proper.

Same happened with sounds a while back if you remember? People demanding to roll back the old sound configs, how it breaks soundmods, yada yada. Strangely, they have all gone silent by now...

 

 

I personally have not been looking at the issues caused by the lighting changes as short term, I have not been under the impression that there has been any evidence leading to some sort of true solid global 'fix' at any point in the future. In fact, the only information I've gained of anyone aiming towards a fix has been the Cup team, and they certainly seem to have been working at it for some time now.

 

I've tried the various settings in game like most people have to try to remedy the issue as well, and have found no combination that has worked properly.

 

I'm all for improvements as well, even if they do require some effort on the modders part to get their content straightened out, but at the same time, what would one expect here? To turn the forums into a dictatorship and not allow justifiable complaints over company induced issues in game, especially when there is little if any information provided to indicate a true solid fix is to be found at some point in the future? With practically no information about the possibility of a solid global fix in the future for both official and user made/ported maps regarding the lighting problems, it is quite easy to assume that there may be no true fix found on at least a global scale, and that the lighting for Arma 3 now primarily only caters to warm climate style environments, and this could remain indefinitely or at least for an extreme amount of time.

 

You can call some of the posts here 'moaning' if you want to as well (including mine), but to be honest, in the end most posts here are likely honest complaints and also the type of posts most people would probably rather Not be wasting time on, as I would rather have spent the last 5 minutes working on my mission rather than typing this response.

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I personally have not been looking at the issues caused by the lighting changes as short term, I have not been under the impression that there has been any evidence leading to some sort of true solid global 'fix' at any point in the future. In fact, the only information I've gained of anyone aiming towards a fix has been the Cup team, and they certainly seem to have been working at it for some time now.

 

I've tried the various settings in game like most people have to try to remedy the issue as well, and have found no combination that has worked properly.

 

I'm all for improvements as well, even if they do require some effort on the modders part to get their content straightened out, but at the same time, what would one expect here? To turn the forums into a dictatorship and not allow justifiable complaints over company induced issues in game, especially when there is little if any information provided to indicate a true solid fix is to be found at some point in the future? With practically no information about the possibility of a solid global fix in the future for both official and user made/ported maps regarding the lighting problems, it is quite easy to assume that there may be no true fix found on at least a global scale, and that the lighting for Arma 3 now primarily only caters to warm climate style environments, and this could remain indefinitely or at least for an extreme amount of time.

 

You can call some of the posts here 'moaning' if you want to as well (including mine), but to be honest, in the end most posts here are likely honest complaints and also the type of posts most people would probably rather Not be wasting time on, as I would rather have spent the last 5 minutes working on my mission rather than typing this response.

You can read newest sitrep, they stated they are working on Documentation related to new changes, which surely will touch new lighting. There is no dictatorship. Many people here are simply wrong (including me) sometimes, and people are correcting them/explaining why *its* done that way. New lighting look brilliant to me, newer seen anything more realistic (in any other games). When my friend saw this, he just sayed "Beacuse its arma, there is no other game like this". Its game where night mean night, day mean day. You cannot got o night operation without night equipment, this is what it was made for. Only thing missing are some soft shadows mentioned above ^^

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I personally have not been looking at the issues caused by the lighting changes as short term, I have not been under the impression that there has been any evidence leading to some sort of true solid global 'fix' at any point in the future. In fact, the only information I've gained of anyone aiming towards a fix has been the Cup team, and they certainly seem to have been working at it for some time now.

 

I've tried the various settings in game like most people have to try to remedy the issue as well, and have found no combination that has worked properly.

 

I'm all for improvements as well, even if they do require some effort on the modders part to get their content straightened out, but at the same time, what would one expect here? To turn the forums into a dictatorship and not allow justifiable complaints over company induced issues in game, especially when there is little if any information provided to indicate a true solid fix is to be found at some point in the future? With practically no information about the possibility of a solid global fix in the future for both official and user made/ported maps regarding the lighting problems, it is quite easy to assume that there may be no true fix found on at least a global scale, and that the lighting for Arma 3 now primarily only caters to warm climate style environments, and this could remain indefinitely or at least for an extreme amount of time.

 

You can call some of the posts here 'moaning' if you want to as well (including mine), but to be honest, in the end most posts here are likely honest complaints and also the type of posts most people would probably rather Not be wasting time on, as I would rather have spent the last 5 minutes working on my mission rather than typing this response.

 

My fear is they don't know how to fix the lighting. They had more than a year to work on it and now we have what we have. Just want to say that they had enough time for that. Great lighting for Tanoa and bad for anything else. Maybe when they sell enough copies of APEX DLC, they will look into that problem. But no one gives any guarantee that lighting will be fixed in the future. Like it was with Helicopters DLC, AFM still very bugged.

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Another thing that needs some tweaking in my opinion: the skin color of the default head looks reddish since the visual upgrade. The head (especially the ears!) looks a bit like sculped from red clay.

 

This is a thing that cannot be tweaked properly with the current visual options. I used a custom color correction (Greenfist Recolor mod) to produce the right image which looks more natural to me.

 

http://imgur.com/a/w9MzY

 

EDIT: I included in the image two color samples taken from the right ear which shows the color difference clearly.

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Another thing that needs some tweaking in my opinion: the skin color of the default head looks reddish since the visual upgrade. The head (especially the ears!) looks a bit like sculped from red clay.

 

This is a thing that cannot be tweaked properly with the current visual options. I used a custom color correction (Greenfist Recolor mod) to produce the right image which looks more natural to me.

 

http://imgur.com/a/w9MzY

 

EDIT: I included in the image two color samples taken from the right ear which shows the color difference clearly.

I believe also the arms of the black men look kind of white since the update.

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The Chinese skin colours are way too dark!

And the black dudes are grey.
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Another thing that needs some tweaking in my opinion: the skin color of the default head looks reddish since the visual upgrade. The head (especially the ears!) looks a bit like sculped from red clay.

 

This is a thing that cannot be tweaked properly with the current visual options. I used a custom color correction (Greenfist Recolor mod) to produce the right image which looks more natural to me.

 

http://imgur.com/a/w9MzY

 

EDIT: I included in the image two color samples taken from the right ear which shows the color difference clearly.

This could be sun-burn?

Perhaps more serious since the change in tropical climatic, sorry Visual Upgrade.

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