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Alpha Two Phase II testing is currently taking place five days each week. More information about testing schedule can be found here
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Alpha Two Phase II testing is currently taking place five days each week. More information about testing schedule can be found here
If you have Alpha Two, you can download the game launcher here, and we encourage you to join us on our Official Discord Server for the most up to date testing news.
World Lighting Seems weird?
Ryonis
Member, Alpha Two
Ive been watching some of the different alpha reviews. People keep saying things feel weird with the character.
One main thing I think is the lighting overall- its giving a disjointed feel to all the assets. Its kind of reducing the quality of the assets (both models and texture). Im not sure what engine they are using to run the game... but it definitely doesn't feel like a realtime sky or any form of raytracing/ semi modern dynamic lighting.
Its most noticeable in interior environments... in castles it looks like everything has even lighting and almost like a set-like above lighting. The light sources aren't the candles/windows/fire.... In some cases it almost looks like the stone walls of interiors in the city look like they themselves are giving off emission.
Outdoor, things are bit easier to fake. They are going for big strokes currently, large trees and environment features cast shadows and it perhaps very simple shadows under monsters... but it does make things feel disjointed. Which is most evident on your main character... feels like they are separate from the world... and the assets are independent.
I'm not sure how difficult it would be to migrate to a engine with better built in lighting system... or if they can pay to plugin a better environmental lighting setup. It would benefit them on so many levels... spell/ability effects would look better, characters would merge with the environmnet better, and the world itself will look even more beautiful. (Valheim shows us how imporant lighting can be to the overall look of a game... they have purposely bad model/textures but its still gorgeous).
WHO KNOWS!
Nice clip of Valheim's lighting with such basic models/textures.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-YNUdZSd8Dg
also
One main thing I think is the lighting overall- its giving a disjointed feel to all the assets. Its kind of reducing the quality of the assets (both models and texture). Im not sure what engine they are using to run the game... but it definitely doesn't feel like a realtime sky or any form of raytracing/ semi modern dynamic lighting.
Its most noticeable in interior environments... in castles it looks like everything has even lighting and almost like a set-like above lighting. The light sources aren't the candles/windows/fire.... In some cases it almost looks like the stone walls of interiors in the city look like they themselves are giving off emission.
Outdoor, things are bit easier to fake. They are going for big strokes currently, large trees and environment features cast shadows and it perhaps very simple shadows under monsters... but it does make things feel disjointed. Which is most evident on your main character... feels like they are separate from the world... and the assets are independent.
I'm not sure how difficult it would be to migrate to a engine with better built in lighting system... or if they can pay to plugin a better environmental lighting setup. It would benefit them on so many levels... spell/ability effects would look better, characters would merge with the environmnet better, and the world itself will look even more beautiful. (Valheim shows us how imporant lighting can be to the overall look of a game... they have purposely bad model/textures but its still gorgeous).
WHO KNOWS!
Nice clip of Valheim's lighting with such basic models/textures.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-YNUdZSd8Dgalso
0
Comments
So far, I've found the lighting in the alpha to be very good, and the high amount of ambient light helpful for making environments easy to visually interpret. MMOs have different design requirements from a lot of other types of games, so while strongly contrasted shadows and large areas of darkness might work well in something like a single-player FPS, they don't work as well here, where high visibility is necessary.
I haven't seen all the interior spaces in the alpha, so it's possible that Intrepid haven't yet done a lighting pass on some, but the dungeons I have seen all seemed to have logically-placed light sources, and a good use of contrasting colors.
My other note is that when the alpha client is run with low-quality video settings, shadowmaps have a low resolution, meaning that there isn't always a clear shadow around characters. At higher quality settings, the shadows have more clearly defined edges, and cleanly connect to objects in the environment. If you've been watching streamers or YouTube videos of the game, they have have used lower quality settings.
Source: AoC Wiki: Unreal Engine 4
He said he turned it down in the city around people but had it on ultra for the rest I believe. He mentioned he has a beefy computer but no way to confirm I guess. The ambient occlusion seems weird.
Take a look around 6:21 for outdoors, and around 7:12 for interiors.
Or just google images ashes of creation, a lot of the lighting looks the same throughout.
I imagine they will update things so cant be too harsh but you would think you would want to stress test on a certain quality level? Are they lettings streamers only play on low quality-- why?
That particular interior does look like one that might not have had a full lighting pass though, the Fire dungeon and the underground stuff near Mistmire have a different 'look' to them that I feel fits perfectly in with how the outside lighting looks also.
I can't always be sure what tweaks can manage to improve, since my group's artist constantly impresses me when she does things, but I know that the overall idea of it is extremely positive for me, preference wise, and by that I do explicitly mean 'looks similar throughout'.
"For what...?"
"Just about everything, really."
The one big difference is that things are usually extremely dim in AC:O unless you pull out a torch; in AoC (at least in alpha right now) there is always ambient light. I'm not sure if that will change later in development.
The second most important is that since this game is still years away from release, there is likely still work to do in lighting.
The most important being that MMO's are not historically known for being cutting edge in terms of technology - they usually run 5 - 6 years behind other game genres at launch- This seems to be about where Ashes is sitting.
The graphics aren't something that they are asking us to critique at this phase of testing, though they certainly would want graphical bugs reported.
From what I can tell in games, the reason images look so good is due to the many layers of lighting and effect that go over the world. I'm sure there will be more done that will improve the lighting, shadows, and other effects.