What will linear lighting mean for players and mods?

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haloterm
Posts: 391
Joined: Sat Feb 16, 2019 5:21 am

What will linear lighting mean for players and mods?

Post by haloterm »

I have read about the upcoming linear lighting change, butnot fully understood what that means.

Will this mean that lights in game work differently?

As a player, I use lots of mods like DREAM, post processing, better lighting, sky, better ambience, splat terrain textures... Do all these mods need to be recompiled by their authors or should they run at least if they run now? The lighting and ambience mods have ingame settings for strength of lights, could these be used to control unwanted side effects?

Or should I best simply wait before upgrading DFU, given that it currently looks very awesome to me?

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Interkarma
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Joined: Sun Mar 22, 2015 1:51 am

Re: What will linear lighting mean for players and mods?

Post by Interkarma »

Linear colour space is more accurate and less bloomy than gamma space. It also uses some material properties differently. So materials configured for gamma will look different under linear and should be reworked to look their best in future releases.

I know KoW is already working on a DREAM release retuned for 0.13 and beyond, and other mod authors using custom Material and Shader objects should do the same. Some mods like Enhanced Sky might need to be made compatible and rebuilt to work properly.

Mods that just change something about the base game (e.g. adjust internal light settings or swap textures) shouldn't be affected much. But they might want to give their mod a tuning pass as linear lights differently and the new default shader doesn't wash out. So light settings that looked OK previously might look too dark/bright depending on context.

Anyway - the first couple of 0.13 releases will be considered Preview builds. A major purpose of Preview releases is that mod users can give their feedback to mod authors, who in turn update their mods. Keep in mind that DFU is designed be installed side-by-side, each with their own mod loadout. So you can run 0.12.x for entertainment play and 0.13.x for testing and feedback. It's not a binary thing where you either upgrade or not.

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