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Flat gamma curve on tactical missions?


Skitso

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I've been thinking this for a while and now decided to make a thread for it. For me at least, the tactical missions seem a bit flat visually - like the game has wrong gamma curve or too little contrast.  While it might be a deliberate design choice to achieve a certain look, adding a bit of contrast (this example has a bit of brightness boost and +10% contrast) makes everything have a bit more depth. As it's now, even the darkest shadows are far from pure black and overall the image looks greyish overall. What you think?

To see the difference better, open both images in a new tab and then switch from tab to tab. (right click the image and choose open image in new tab)

image.thumb.png.4df831b9ba72cb018101e82bdfa81d58.png

image.thumb.png.e2081a2cffbc580de469509518441590.png

Edited by Skitso
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On 12/31/2022 at 8:40 AM, Skitso said:

I've been thinking this for a while and now decided to make a thread for it. For me at least, the tactical missions seem a bit flat visually - like the game has wrong gamma curve or too little contrast.  While it might be a deliberate design choice to achieve a certain look, adding a bit of contrast (this example has a bit of brightness boost and +10% contrast) makes everything have a bit more depth. As it's now, even the darkest shadows are far from pure black and overall the image looks greyish overall. What you think?

To see the difference better, open both images in a new tab and then switch from tab to tab. (right click the image and choose open image in new tab)

image.thumb.png.4df831b9ba72cb018101e82bdfa81d58.png

image.thumb.png.e2081a2cffbc580de469509518441590.png

So personally I prefer the before images; I feel like the after images are too contrasty. But I think this is ultimately a question of personal taste, and I think the settings panel has some sliders for contrast and colour balancing that are currently hidden because they weren't working properly (or maybe they were only affecting the tactical combat).

Anyway, probably it wouldn't be too much work to hook them up properly so when we do the final graphics settings work I'll take a look and see if we can include them. That way you and anyone else with similar preferences can visually boost the scenes just by moving a slider.

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57 minutes ago, Chris said:

So personally I prefer the before images; I feel like the after images are too contrasty. But I think this is ultimately a question of personal taste, and I think the settings panel has some sliders for contrast and colour balancing that are currently hidden because they weren't working properly (or maybe they were only affecting the tactical combat).

Anyway, probably it wouldn't be too much work to hook them up properly so when we do the final graphics settings work I'll take a look and see if we can include them. That way you and anyone else with similar preferences can visually boost the scenes just by moving a slider.

Thanks for the reply Chris. Don't take this as any hard criticism - it's more of a visual nit picking and I can of course appreciate the fact that people have different opinions about visual stuff.

I hate too contrasty look myself and crushed blacks are something one should really try to avoid in any image. That said, gamma curve should be also set so that any pure black stuff on screen is 0,0,0 so image wouldn't look too geyish/flat.

Now, for example, if you take a look at the shadowy part inside of the air conditioning machine in the eastern tileset image I posted above, these kinds of areas should probably be pure black. Currently it's grey and this leads me to think gamma is set a bit too shallow which makes the image flatter looking than what is "optimal".

Edited by Skitso
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