Colors

[Meldric]

Hi everyone!

I had in mind that I already had a fix for this, but I am actually not able to find it again
:(

In the screenshot below, the colors of the sky are very ugly, because there are clearly visible "color-jumps". This is also very annoying under water (for me). Does anyone know a solution to this? It feels like I should increase the number of colors used (no idea how)...

http://www.wolfshalle.de/screenshots/prob1.png

Meldric

[Sailor Steve]

This was also a problem with SH4, not quite so bad with SH3. I could be way off base on this, but it's my understanding that it's tied in with Graphics Card settings.

[Meldric]

I have seen screenshots in the screenies thread were it looks perfectly smooth... so it looks like there is a cure for this...

[Meldric]

Hi!

Anything on this from anyone?
Yesterday I was switching to external camera while under water in the night... It looks EXTREMLY ugly in some cases, because you basicly only see two or three big blocks in different shades of the water color. It is hardly possible to spot the boat when this happens.

Very unsatisfying...

[Pintea]

The phenomenon is called Color Banding (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colour_banding) and in SH5 happens mostly at night when the range of colors in the sky is very limited - mostly blacks. The issue will be less or more visible depending on how much light there is in the scene (moon/clouds etc.) or HDR settings, but it will not go away. Also it depends on your graphics hardware and settings (how the gamma curve is set) and monitor.

Unfortunately, since the sky is procedurally generated from code and is not using a texture (like in SH4), no modding can fix it. The solution would have been to apply a dithering filter on the sky before it gets rendered and also apply a color correction filter to give more precision to the blacks instead of the whites (for this last one, some fixes could be done in the shaders).

[Meldric]

Î found this:
http://www.subsim.com/radioroom/showthread.php?p=1861420#post1861420

Giving it a try as I understood that Gap is also trying to solve this by editing the used colors. I am afraid that this would not be possible to fix unless someone would actually fix the exe's code, if I understand you right?

That is a pitty, because it definitly spoils the game a bit. Sometimes you have just beautiful screens wasted by this problem...
:(

Dreaming:
Maybe TDW would find the position in the exe and increase the gradient to 24bit?
Or maybe this could be done by some hidden setting in a file somewhere?

It really annoyed from the first time I started the game...

[Pintea]

Messing with the colors may help a little, but as I said it will not solve the problem. If you want to have a nice dark sky gradient at night with brighter horizon lines you will still get banding (unless the sky is the same color from top to bottom - i.e. no gradient).

The colors are already 24bit. The dithering solution implies rendering the sky to an offscreen texture and then applying a dither filter or blur filter on that. This is too much to do by just hacking the .exe.

What may improve the aspect is messing with the sky shader. I'll try doing that myself when I have some free time.

Î found this:
http://www.subsim.com/radioroom/showthread.php?p=1861420#post1861420

Giving it a try as I understood that Gap is also trying to solve this by editing the used colors. I am afraid that this would not be possible to fix unless someone would actually fix the exe's code, if I understand you right?

That is a pitty, because it definitly spoils the game a bit. Sometimes you have just beautiful screens wasted by this problem...
:(

Dreaming:
Maybe TDW would find the position in the exe and increase the gradient to 24bit?
Or maybe this could be done by some hidden setting in a file somewhere?

It really annoyed from the first time I started the game...

[Meldric]

Sounds promising... Would that be any time soon?