Let's talk about light

We get biggest gamechanger update, at least for me, that adding AI driving around the map. AI that indicates when turning, turning lights at night etc. But there's the problem - lighting. It's looks good at close, where 30 meters is enough to ruin everything.

Let's see at Miramar.


At very close lights looks great. Bright with a lot of details. Let's move away 30 meters away and...

Spoiler

...at day it looks like this. As we know stopping distance from 50km/h is around 30m and we can't tell if that car is braking, turning or driving with lights on. This is how it's looks like when we turn on lights and brake.

Spoiler

Slightly better but still, not good enough.

Also brake light not always is bright enough. In game there are "stages". That might work for blinkers (and it's working) but brake light should be always strong enough to see them.

Spoiler

This is how brake light should be...

...not like this.

Alright, back to the topic - distance and visibility.
Screenshots are made at night so few of them are almost pitch black. So this is how it look at day. Each cone is 10 meters away and last one is lying down. Some of them are moved a little from the line so they are "visible" on screenshots where camera is on the line with default FOV.


This is rear view of Miramar at night with lights on 50 meters away. Well, because we barely see any lights you have to trust me on this one.


There is front blinker 10m away...

Spoiler

...and 50m away.

Spoiler

Pretty bad. However Miramar is one of the cars with best headlight visibility.

Spoiler

10m

20m

20m high beams

50m

50m high beams


I bet you didn't expect this after hearing "best visibility", right? Well, I told "one of the best" so look at this.

Spoiler

Bus headlights from 50m

50m beams

high beams somewhere around 100m

So results are pretty bad (if not horrible) and I didn't mention old cars like D-series, Covet, Grand Marshal that are a little outdated comparing to new models. However I see that someone (sorry dev team, but I lost a track who made what vehicle, sorry) using same textures for new cars. For example travel trailer or bus tail lights are using same, light textures like cars mentioned above. That why back of the bus looks like this at night.

Spoiler

From close

and around 30m away


There is Grand Marshal. Not a great example, because of the bug with reflections (on screens we are see only flares and reflections, not the lights itself).

So is there any option to improve it? One way is to do it the same way like in the lightbars. However I worry that level of detail will be gone, because lightbars have pure light colour without details. But what if combine it? After the certain distance game will change texture from detailed to more simple but visible from the distance? Size also is important. Smaller blinkers and thin, small ledlights are invisible from few meters and only flares creating any source of light, that after a greater distance tart flashing become invisible anyway.

 

The problem with lighting in Beam is that headlights are brighter than the sun in game.
Edit: Forgot to add that the game engine don'st handle lighting very well atm.

 

maybe its better with an hdr monitor

 

I know about engine limitations. However in every game engine there are some tricks you can do. What about dynamic texture and flare changing. Depending of the time engine would change texture or "power" how to display it. Or make just two different textures that would be simply replaced basing on the in game time.
Like this (left for night, right for day) but it's changing by the time.


Also like I said before light source vanish after the certain distance depending of the size of the light.

Engine don't rendering it because of the LOD or it's just too small. This also causing a problem.

 

Honestly, we just need an "environment rework" update that completely remakes the lighting. The lighting issues in this game are so bad that there's no way of salvaging the current system.

 

Game loves to suck away FPS if you have lighting on anything but the lowest, hoping for optimizations is a maybe

 

Oh, that is terrible. That alone is why I hardly ever drive at night in Beam, along with the fact that you need the high beams on constantly just to see anything.

 

Dynamic lighting in a game like this is very compute intensive, nevermind the fact T3D is.. pretty old by now, to put it like that.

 

Wasn't somebody working on better projectors? I'm sure that would help things at least a little bit for now. I agree that the in-game environment lighting is abysmal.

 

we seriously need the lights to be addressed.
i never drive in beam at night for the very reason default displayed with his photo.
it's horrendous.

 

I could barely drive on the Utah map at night and had to go so slow just to avoid crashing.

 

The biggest issue is the engine. However lack of consistency in the way how each car have modeled lights also don't helping.

For example this monstrosity put on Burnside.


In every car lights are different made. Some have better textures, other have different beam angles and range, different flares etc. and I don't talking about engine limitations. Just some lights will illuminate whole trees but only for about 50 meters. New GM have for example lights that are pointed almost directly on ground so you don't see anything at night. There is even one car where high beams are weaker than road lights.

However there are also some engine issues with FOV. You can see more if you "zoom out" and vice versa.

Spoiler

So there are two options: massive overhaul or just forget about it and do it like in Assetto Corsa - only day time.

 

Oh yes, night driving, some 80% of my driving has been during dark hours and it does feel bit odd to drive during the day, so this is something I hope to improve, one of the areas that have not yet been improved much I believe.

I guess that current status of lights are just a placeholder.

Even with current limitations it can be made lot better, but usually such randomly setup lights mean that aspect is waiting something.

Who knows, maybe they have plans for overhaul, maybe they don't know yet if overhaul is going to work or be possible to deliver, so one can only hope and wait.

As even Nadeox1 admits lights being weird in game, you can be sure that they know about issue, with their skill level they would not leave lights set up so randomly if there would not be something in plans, but are their plans such that they are willing to share them yet?

Perhaps not, but yeah, either removal of night or overhaul is indeed needed and if we look how huge improvements last updates have brought to game, it is pretty certain they won't leave this illumination stone unturned either, after all they are not amateurs, they do get paid from the job


There was a mod on forums, realistic headlights which did help to seeing part, used better textures and different spotlight configs I believe, also I have made some better lights myself, it is possible to make lights to that you see, it is not even difficult, but there are drawbacks.
One aspect is that range of lights is very small, other is textures could be more optimized, but then way how light reflects back from surface that light is cast, that is big issue.

IRL when light meets road surface, there is always roughness and there are very tiny pieces of pavement facing towards headlight, so light reflects more easily.
If there is wet road, people say it sucks the light, when instead surface is smooth and light gets reflected to oncoming traffic etc.

When in computer game light uses correct model it is like light being sucked to road as in game roads are super smooth, there is nothing that would reflect light back and some faking is then needed to emulate roughness, or so I think it was usually done, but I read about this over year ago and my memory constantly lies to me, so don't quote me on that.

Anyway basic problem was that perfectly correct model for lighting was not working so well as there is not enough detail on surfaces, all kind of tricks are then done to get around with lack of roughness on surfaces. Illuminating road with headlights that are almost parallel to road is then pretty difficult to get right on all situations.

My guess is that devs want to tackle that issue properly at some point, but it is just a guess, there might be lot more reasons why lights are terrible bad and pretty randomly set at the moment, also there might be much more technical issues than I can even guess, but as devs want to get it done properly, most likely, it means they might want to create some new cool way instead of just applying fake numbers on different materials for how they should reflect light back to driver and it probably takes bit longer to get right.

At least that has been way devs have solved other usual challenges in making good simulation.

Remember how horrible sounds were? They did do something cool and unique solutions with sounds, it would be logical to except something like that from lights too

 

They could be working on this as we speak. I mean, while it is annoying when light isn't always properly presented, it still takes lots of work.

 

The rendering of the headlights are a common problem in many engines, something to do with rendering transparency order/priority or smthn. That afaik is why sometimes the headlight textures (which contain transparency) render on top of the light source.

 

I think another thing to take into account is just how different your eyes work from a camera/screen. I mean, it's not the whole picture, (pun intended) but when you see headlights at night, esp on a two lane road, your rods get bleached out making the light seem much more intense. This has the secondary effect of ruining any night vision you had. Most cameras sport poor performance in low light, either boosting lights way to high, or turning everything into a muddy soup of almost color. I think most games that have night time settings throw way too much color and light in your face. Look at just an example, NFS underground 2, that game was lit so insanely, it may as well have been daytime in some places. Yes I know that Und 2 is a very old game, but I'm talking more in terms of artstyle. And in und 2, you could barely see your (or anyone's) taillights too.

 

Most games don't have pitch black night for one reason - gameplay. Almost every game that have "dark night" have complains that "we, as a player, don't see anything and it isn't fun". There are few exceptions but most of them are experimental or still in WIP state (Outerra engine or that FPS in space where no lights means no lights, I forgot the tittle). Every game, from FPS to RTS and race games have night bright enough so player can see it, but dark enough so it doesn't feel like day. And that why in NFS:U2 you can see cars as good as at day, and that why tail lights were just for aesthetic reason.

 

Yeah, overall lighting in t3d is a bit dated

 

Oh I agree with you that bright night makes sense for gameplay reasons, but I respect beam for making choices that are not always conducive to gameplay for the sake of realism. Am I saying I like the lighting engine as it is now? No. But I don't want night lighting to be like the light runner modes either.