Readability and realism disappeared

[NightMan]

Please compare the two screenshots.

One was taken with version 2.7 and the other with version 2.8.

With version 2.7 we can see every detail, in the gauges, in the HUD, in the warning lights, in the landing lights, etc.

With version 2.8 we can only see "whitish" squares and circles and the HUD appears to have been drawn with a permanent ink marker over a wet paper.

Please ED, solve this and give us back our beloved Ka-50.

 

[bingbean]

It would be better if you use same mission and exactly same place for comparison.

But yes , 2.7 cockpit in general look more sharp and better. 

[J-man]

Agreed, at my end, even in the default 8:00 am, clear sky setting for weather and time, the cockpit looks washed out and it is hard to even tell wich of the landing gear lights are lit when the display is not in shadow since they are a foggy white now.

The cockpit lighting certainly looks worse and his harder to read than before. I can also confirm that the hud is thicker or blurry compared to how it looked before.

Can you tell, without looking at the lever itself, if my gear is up or down:

Compared to how it used to look in similar conditions (older screenshot, pre-syria release, but still representative of how it was before 2.8):

nullnull

[NineLine]

What is your Gamma at, also a track or mission can be helpful so I can compare 1:1 what you are seeing.

Thanks

[NineLine]

I did a 2.8 vs 2.7 test. Now I think the new lighting shines (no pun intended) in live rather than screenshots. The lighting is set up to adjust like your eye might based on lighting conditions. I think most more modern sims use this and I think it looks much better.

Here are my comparison screenshots. Done on the Channel Map, 4 Ka-50s with a different rotation of 90 degrees. 2.2 Gamma. 

[bingbean]

For me the 2.7 lighting and shadows make more sense. On first two pictures , you are pointed directly to the sun. On 2.7 is dashboard logically dark, on 2.8 is bright and all instruments looks like underligt. Where come all the lights from. Does have pilot reflective helmet or what?  When the instruments are all the time so bright , they looks like they are completely flat. 3D depth effect of dashboard instruments and glass effect over instruments looks much more better on 2.7 for me. Other things is HUD, no matter how much i try adjust brightness, i am not able get so sharp result as in 2.7. The HUD on 2.8 is still little bit blurry or not visible over horisont.

/edit

OK i made a closer look to your photos, when i zoomed in i noticed it doesn't look so bad in this case.  Especially of flat looking. It is most significant on speedometer. On you pictures it looks fine, on my personal experience not. And i figure out there is a difference between default russian cockpit and english cockpit. So english cockpit is still WIP , and there is no problem only with wrong text in some places.

Edited November 3, 2022 by bingbean

[J-man]

3 hours ago, NineLine said:

I did a 2.8 vs 2.7 test. Now I think the new lighting shines (no pun intended) in live rather than screenshots. The lighting is set up to adjust like your eye might based on lighting conditions. I think most more modern sims use this and I think it looks much better.

Here are my comparison screenshots. Done on the Channel Map, 4 Ka-50s with a different rotation of 90 degrees. 2.2 Gamma. 

The outside does look nicer I think, but the inside gets over-exposed. This is an issues when modeling Eye Exposure as if the whole image is beeing looked at by the player. 

In your screenshots, the helo is off, but the landing gear lights appear as bright and washed out as they do in my 2.8 Screenshot where 3 of them are supposed to be lit and 3 dark. In any RL images of the Ka-50 I can find on google, the lights look as they did in 2.7, distinctly colored green or red, even when off.

 

I also have a suggestion for improving the new exposure effect:

In real live, the eyes adapt to the brightness of what ever you are looking at directly but in a video game, the exposure is based on everything on screen, even if the player is not looking out of the window but on the instruments, leading to an overexposed instrument panel. In RL, if the pilot looks on the instruments, the pilots eyes would apapt to the low brightness of the instrument panel and the out-of-focus outside in the pilots peripheral vision would become very bright and vice versa.

This difference between exposure for what is on the whole screen v.s. exposure for what the player is looking at is a major issue for people without headtracking, as they usually don´t limit the screen content to just the instrument panel by leaning forward (or zooming in) but usually have a more static view that covers the panel + the outside.

There will almost always be a huge light intensity difference between the outside and the inside of the cockpit (at least if you use correct PBR Values for the sun). Based on the 2.8 Screenshots,it appears you have only one global exposure value for the entiere image, you will likely always either underexpose the outside to have realistic inside lighting OR overexpose the inside of the cockpit to have good brightness values on the outside.

In the Unreal Engine, there is a relativly new post processing setting called "local exposure". This allows subsections of the screen to havet smoothed independent exposure. This compensates for not knowing at what part of the screen the player is actually looking (outside or inside), keeping every part properly exposed, even in scenes with high brightness variance like an aircraft cockpit.

Take a look at an example here:

https://forums.unrealengine.com/t/local-exposure-is-in-ue5-main/274274

Edited November 4, 2022 by J-man

[randomTOTEN]

Laser warning system lights are different colors in 2.7(red) vs 2.8(white?). It's also apparent with the gear indicator lights in each of the posted images.

[okopanja]

@NineLinewhen you have time please take a look at following bug report, I suspect that skhval itself is affected...

 

 

[bingbean]

@okopanja good point , and the solution in there topic is actually helpful in this case as well.  I also reduced the gamma from 2.2 to 1.8 and now it looks quite nice.  The landing gear light are not still so visible as they was in 2.7, but in global in this settings it is OK for me.

7 hours ago, Hobel said:

1. turn off the "Cockpit Global Illumination", this makes the difference in the skhval.

 

 

[okopanja]

3 hours ago, bingbean said:

@okopanja good point , and the solution in there topic is actually helpful in this case as well.  I also reduced the gamma from 2.2 to 1.8 and now it looks quite nice.  The landing gear light are not still so visible as they was in 2.7, but in global in this settings it is OK for me.

Well, I would not mark this as solution, since this might be just a workaround...

[Dallas88B]

No.
Turning down gamma is not a solution. Just makes everything darker.

Neither is turning off cockpit illumination....it might make it easier to see the skhval but you don't have any cockpit illumination.

maybe the solution is only fly night missions (sarcasm)

[NineLine]

7 hours ago, Dallas88B said:

No.
Turning down gamma is not a solution. Just makes everything darker.

Neither is turning off cockpit illumination....it might make it easier to see the skhval but you don't have any cockpit illumination.

maybe the solution is only fly night missions (sarcasm)

If your hope is to have it look like it did before, that won't happen, this is a step forward towards more realistic looking lighting, its still being tweaked but we wont return to the dark flatter look.

[Dallas88B]

30 minutes ago, NineLine said:

this is a step forward towards more realistic looking lighting

Oh. my mistake. I didn't see that in the change log. Are the other differences deliberate too?

[okopanja]

4 hours ago, NineLine said:

If your hope is to have it look like it did before, that won't happen, this is a step forward towards more realistic looking lighting, its still being tweaked but we wont return to the dark flatter look.

My personal impression:

- outside looks more vivid in 2.8 than in 2.7

- cockpits look worse in 2.8

Also note as in the link I posted earlier: there is a definite degradation of SKHVAL display. True, it will work better if we disable Cockpit Global Illumination, but this in software world is called a workaround and not the solution.

Aside from the overwhelming negative feedback you are getting on 2.8, I do actually appreciate lots of tiny improvements you have made with 2.8 (e.g. ME finally shows the filename, there is a very nice magnetic declination ruler now). I know that lots of things had changes, but I believe that further refinements are needed.

I am looking forward to BS3, and hope these things will be solved by the upcoming release.

[NightMan]

I have just tested version 2.8.1.34437, and this hasn't yet been corrected.