couldn't they simply turn down, for lack of a better word, the "brightness" on the map? create the illusion of darkness?
Moment you change anything on a wide scale, it's gotta new calculate shadows that weren't there before but are there now, one of Hawken's biggest problems is there are no specular maps what so ever. Even when at the highest settings, the shadows and other lighting effects feel very fake the AO option, sure it helps darken shadows to make them look a bit more real, but that's all the more it can do. Taking a bit from Nvidia here, "Ambient occlusion is a technique used in production to approximate the effect of environment lighting. Unlike the dull, flat look of local lighting models, ambient occlusion can add realism to a scene by accentuating small surface details and adding soft shadows." ambient occlusion can't do it's job well if it can't really differ light from dark. Hence why when the setting is turned on the overall scene looks darker, since it's considering everything to be a shadow. It can even get messier, when you consider in the various forms of AO, Screen Space AO, Horizon Based AO, Nvidia's own HBAO+ and AMD's HDAO. It's something that requires already pre-existing good light and specular maps which is something Hawken doesn't really have at this time. It's possible the new devs can look into it to fix and bring into the game but idk their budget, etc, etc.
On another section, you gotta consider the engine Hawken runs on. Unreal Engine 3 was never really the nicest of engines for night/dark effects due to the way it does lighting. Engines like Unity, CryEngine, ID Tech 4/5, Frostbite, they're all multipass lighting engines, Unreal Engine for the most part until UE4, has primarily been a single pass engine. Multipass has it's advantages of being able to as the name implies make multiple seperate lighting effect passes, making things like soft shadows and HB/HDAO possible with relatively little cost on the user front. The way the current engine for Hawken works(UE3) it's gotta do lighting, specular, shadows, light rays, glow/bloom, AO, all in one pass, making light calculation very slow. You know how Last Eco runs like fuzzy bunny even crashes 32 bit users? Yea this is exactly why, it's gotta do all the shadows, all the lighting effects for that map all at once. Granted yes if you were to lower the gamma down to being pure darkness, the lighting problems get alievated to an extent, however having lights on the mechs themselves, once those are on. New shadows from the smallest details of the mech have to be calculated and rendered. Shadows from everybody elses lights must be rendered by the player client as well the further away you are the problems lessen, but don't go completely away. Then you gotta figure in just like in real life, if you got a flashlight in the dark, theres a main focus point of light, then an overcast of light. This is indirect lighting, a lot of engines can do it well if it's programmed to, even UE3. However if you look through some of HawkenEngine.ini's settings, it seems ADH never really got around to doing much in the lighting department, they sorta slapped things together and hoped it worked. There are settings in there for specular maps, indirect lighting, etc, etc but it's all blank meaning they never worked on it, even destructable environments are in there, again blank just like a lot of the lighting effects. If you look at a good game that uses UE3 to the fullest like say Batman Arkham Origins, the lighting details that Hawken is missing start to become really evident. Even Blacklight Retrobution has better lighting effects then Hawken. If Josh and the gang can get lighting up and running the right way, not like it is now, then yeah these kinds of maps can become a reality.
Edited by Toxic Rainbows, 02 April 2015 - 09:21 PM.
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