Thread: Why Silvertine looks so bad

Have come up with why I believe that Silvertine Lodes seems so much worse than anywere else in Moria as regards to the brightness, and it's because there is not one, but two effects that are used for brightening: First off is the glowy blue air, and secondly is the personal light source that is not your personal light source, but is foisted on you once you pass a certain point going into Silvertine.

Screenshots to illustrate. All Screenshots are on Bullroarer with ambient light set to minimum. Excuse the size of the shots, but I didn't want to resize and introduce outside effects to what I actually see, and this happens as soon as you resave a .jpg file. Edited to include links to fullsize pics as they got shrunk on submit.

In this first series, I'm progressing down the tunnel just below the Gredbyg camp thats adjacent to Durins Vault (or was before it got closed off in this build). In this first shot, it looks about right to me, dark, but not so that you can't see what your doing.


http://goo.gl/ky0pN

Then as we walk down, we add in the sourceless blue air glow. This I could live with, preferably turned down a notch or two as it makes everything look washed out IMO.


http://goo.gl/lf56Y

We progress a bit further and suddenly we add our own personal light source, and note that this is not the one that you can adjust with alt F10, this one is foisted on you as is, no adjustment available. You can turn your personal light source on as well, making it even brighter than shown.... if you so had the inclination.


http://goo.gl/6ouPL

The result of this gets especially bad when you encouter a large area that has light coloured textures around you.. you dont feel like your in Moria anymore, it's more of a Fairy Wonderland feel. Like this:


http://goo.gl/mIIyp

If, as reported elsewhere, this is all going live on Monday PLEASE turn off that personal light.... I can see it's probably too late to change lighting for areas... but just losing that lightsource would make this more bearable, especially the way it throws idiot shadows around the place, like walking over rail tracks makes the shadow of them skitter all over your screen.

Stick in a quest that give us a clicky in our inventory that gives us the glow if we want it... a Crystal as a reward for one of the first quests in that can be clicked to turn on the full light, over and above our personal one, maybe with an annotation about how to turn on the personal light for those that don't know about it.

In closing I'd like to take a little reply based poll - if your like me and would like to be able to choose whether to turn on your personal light (or against) add a reply to the thread saying so.

What say you?

Only allowed 4 shots per post so this was added:

This last shot is still on Bullroarer, but in the "They Mined too Fast" instance, and is as far as I know, an original untweaked Moria - behold the sort of thing that made me fall in love with the atmosphere of Moria when it first came out:


http://goo.gl/0ds2n

Not this (almost fell out of my chair laughing when he said this one)


http://goo.gl/DWNG8

Originally Posted by Eriandor

What say you?

I'd like to continue echoing what I hear others saying: Silvertine Lodes is far too bright. I'm very happy for your evidence that a lot of the problem is being caused by this personal light. It seems like is another example of Turbine scrapping old design choices that allowed flexibility. You had an ambient light slider, but instead of a tooltip pointing it out let's just crank it to max and set it for everyone. You have your own personal light, and they could have added a simple tooltip to help new players - but instead they add a new personal light that's stuck always on.


Please please please Turbine, stop reinventing the wheel. You've already paid developers to design workarounds for areas being too dark or too bright. If you scrap that design work, you're just going to have to go through every zone in the game tinkering with the lights. Empower your players to help themselves, and you'll save yourself a ton of redundant work.

Agreed, have wanted to turn off that light when riding goats in the lower areas of Moria for some time as the shadows it casts drive me nuts. With the added lighting effects it's OTT.

Yes please, let us choose our lighting level.

"The cavern is dark, Iorvan. Travel with care" - Too funny, he looks likly to get the equivelant of sunburn where he's standing... wait, maybe it's radiation blindness from the crystals? Is that.... Uranium?

Don't know if the clicky crystal idea could be made to work, but sounds like a great solution to me.

+1 on having choice.

Uranium... so the Globsnaga aren't fungus'd after all, its cancerous mutations /nods sagely.

A lot of players have complained in these forums, and probably directly to Turbine as well, that Moria is too dark.

This is probably a response to that feedback.

None of this tweaking of the lighting in Moria would be necessary, if the freekin' PERSONAL TORCH were actually useful.

As for Silvertine, I avoid that area like the plague, & am ever so glad I never have to go back there.

Originally Posted by Eriandor

secondly is the personal light source that is not your personal light source, but is foisted on you once you pass a certain point going into Silvertine.

We progress a bit further and suddenly we add our own personal light source, and note that this is not the one that you can adjust with alt F10, this one is foisted on you as is, no adjustment available. You can turn your personal light source on as well, making it even brighter than shown.... if you so had the inclination.

This second personal lightsource (different and distinct from the ALT-F10 one) is the dynamic DX10/DX11 lightsource that is responsible for creating dynamic lighting/shadows in certain areas. Originally, it worked quite well and was automatically turned on in many areas of Moria. Gradually, however, they have disabled it in more and more areas so that, if memory serves, it is now only active in Silvertine, Redhorn, and Foundations of Stone. It's also used on Mirkwook at night (or was, haven't been back there in a long time).

It used to look quite nice. But they mangled it while fixing other things way back around Volume 2 Book 8. But, for the record, it has always automatically turned on in those areas. So I doubt it's easily made into a toggle.

Here's an example of how it used to look in the Great Delving before they removed the Dynamic Lighting/Shadows.



To my mind, they should honor the original aesthetic design of those zones, figure out what went wrong with the dynamic lighting, and reinstate it rather than just putting these band-aids all over everything, disabling it willy-nilly, and otherwise mangling things until what we end up with is what we see (on Bullroarer) in the Silvertine.

--H

Originally Posted by Fred2011

Agreed, have wanted to turn off that light when riding goats in the lower areas of Moria for some time as the shadows it casts drive me nuts. With the added lighting effects it's OTT.

Options, advanced graphics, DX10 dynamic shadows to disabled.
And gone are those idiot shadows.

Now if only they'd add a toggle for that light

I just checked my settings in the Dolven View (yeah not the Silvertine Lodes, but I just logged on for a bit). I have an ambient light slider, a brightness slider, a contrast slider, and a gamma slider. Yeah I do have a DX11 card, so your mileage may vary, as they say. I like the DX 10 dynamic shadows, even if they don't always render properly and I can make Moria as dark and forbidding as I like. BTW, you can hop over to Nud-Melek to compare the new Moria to the old one. Personally, I like the revamp. To me it makes Moria seem even more vast and intricate. I also note that updates occasionally bollixes the .Net framework runtime so you might have to restore it from the Control panel to make your sliders work.

Originally Posted by cdq1958

I just checked my settings in the Dolven View (yeah not the Silvertine Lodes, but I just logged on for a bit). I have an ambient light slider, a brightness slider, a contrast slider, and a gamma slider. Yeah I do have a DX11 card, so your mileage may vary, as they say. I like the DX 10 dynamic shadows, even if they don't always render properly and I can make Moria as dark and forbidding as I like.

None of those sliders will make Moria darker than the baseline light setting. And they are dramatically raising that baseline.

So, Moria (especially the Silvertine) will be brighter, and there's nothing you can do about it.

So the problem is they pulled out the lighting sliders and such? Can we not darken the area manually? Or will I have to tint my monitor whenever im in Moria?

Originally Posted by Pellwen

So the problem is they pulled out the lighting sliders and such? Can we not darken the area manually? Or will I have to tint my monitor whenever im in Moria?

No, of course they are not removing the sliders. But the sliders do not move infinitely in either direction.

For example, in the case of the ambient light slider, its default setting is zero. . . and is at the far left. So you can only brighten, not darken from the game's baseline/unaugmented light setting.

And since they hey are increasing that baseline lighting, everything will be brighter in Moria (especially Silvertine). You will only be able to brighten it from that new baseline. Not darken.

Ok, I did another test, but can't post screenies . If I turn my ambient light down to the minimum setting, my screen is much darker than the OP's screenie. If I put the ambient light and the brightness slider over to the minimum setting, my screen is essentially black and the game is unplayable. I do agree with Hurin that the baseline brightness is higher (jump over to Nud-Melek and compare it to the Dolven-View … the new Dolven-View is noticeably brighter). One reason why I hated old Moria is that it was too dark for my old eyes to see well enough for the game to be playable, so I had to move the sliders over so much that when I left Moria for Lorien, Lorien had blooming issues. As they say, YMMV; and yes Silvertine is quite bright, but I can see a shaft in the roof now that I didn't know was there.