The Unbearable Brightness of Seeing: Graphics Bloat

[Kezrai_Charzai]

Most of us enjoy the way certain aspects of EVE are pretty, I’m sure. The nice space backgrounds, some of the ships, a few of the skins, some station interiors.

However the CCP dev team appears to be way too focused on changing the way EVE looks lately. As opposed to the way EVE works.

It’s getting to the point where brighter colors, flashy buttons, shiny bars, colored backgrounds, blinking station interiors… it’s just reaching visual saturation and beyond.

I can hardly undock from Amarr without getting blinded by the glaring yellow nebulae background. My docking and undocking is taking longer and longer. Log in, undock, warp to gate and jump is showing more lags and pauses than ever.

There are parts of “empty space” where the sky is busier and brighter than a desert sunset or an afternoon thundershower.

While I don’t want to “remove” any of this graphics bloat for other players who enjoy it, I’m certainly starting to look into which graphics options I can turn off/down to cut some of this visual clutter. (My PC can easily handle the current graphics settings btw - it’s somewhere in the client/server connection or synchronization that’s causing the pauses/lag.)

Way back in school days, my graphics prof pointed out “A great game can get by with merely decent graphics. But no amount of graphics will made a bad game good”.

To my mind, all CCP is doing here is making it more likely that people will turn off the excessive graphics, but still suffer the lag and delays.

Anybody got any good settings tips for reducing the glare and clutter, and improving performance?

[tutucox_Khamsi]

i play in potato mode all i see is grey

@Kezrai_Charzai

But no amount of graphics will made a bad game good”

sure
this game for example is great

[Optimus_Maximus]

@Kezrai_Charzai

I can hardly undock from Amarr without getting blinded by the glaring yellow nebulae background

When you mentioned that all I could think about is all those poor players based on Amarr be like on undock

Overwhelmed at Sunset [Brendan Fraser-Bedazzled-20th Century Fox-2000]

[tutucox_Khamsi]

@Optimus_Maximus

When you mentioned that all I could think about is all those poor players based on Amarr be like on undock

naaaa
golden space best space

edit:
btw i have a theory
i said here before
nothing is more bright than a white screen
and yet , eve sun burn our eyes

i think is just our lizard brain telling us, don’t look at the sun your idiot , you will become blind

try to look at this pic and see how for no apparent reason you fell strange

[ISD_Drew]

moved to General Issues - EVE Online Forums – reminder, helpful responses preferred.

[Small-Kitty-Paws]

Speaking of Amarr…

[Kezrai_Charzai]

Yep, that’s pretty much the view every single time I undock a char in Amarr.

Except on a bigger screen, that’s brighter, in a semi-darkened room. It’s almost painful on the eyes, and everything is just washed out in this glaring field of yellow.

It gets pretty old after the five hundredth time. Or even the fifth. To the point where I sometimes skip an Amarr-based character just because I don’t feel like undocking there.

There’s quite a few other locations that are almost as bad, but Amarr is definitely one of the most bothersome. We really need an intensity slider for nebulae and space-clouds, maybe suns too. At least the suns aren’t always in your face filling the entire screen though.

[Lodemai]

+1
the skyboxes look good, but for me they detract a bit from the feeling of being in space, it is supposed to be mostly black with some cool thing here and there, not “light everywhere but I should not turn camera left or be blinded”

[Srima_Darkstar]

Recently I was told, I am playing nothing more than a fancy 3D screen saver, running behind the windowed UI text only game. To some degree that is true, Eve could be played without the 3D visuals at all. The game however would be very bland, kind of like losing all the cool moves in your favorite Assassin’s Creed video game.

The only time I have issue, with Amarr existing inside a large gas nebula, is when they have white text on no background. With nothing contrasting the text on the screen, I must whip the camera around to the darkest part to read it. To fix this issue, they need to keep light text on a contrasting windowed background or use drop shadows.

To make the original poster happy or happier, they need to add a gamma slider to the 3D only and not effect the 2D windows in the foreground. Not all of space is dark, especially around stars, supernovas, and such. NASA coated the astronaut’s visor with a thin layer of gold to prevent them from going blind on the moon. Eve is suppose to be some +20,000 years later, I would assume they could do better.

Kezrai Charzai
Anybody got any good settings tips for reducing the glare and clutter, and improving performance?

I don’t use a lot of transparent windows, overall transparency is turned down to 30% at most. I locked the size and position of the item, overview, and placed chat under overview on the right. Just below chat is my drone window (if available). These windows take up roughly 25% of the right side of my screen. Maps are made floating but appear in the 75% on the left side. Now I would dual monitor this game but as stated above, the 3D view is very unimportant. If you play with the system map up, as I do most of the time. I use my D-Scan a lot. The 3D screen (eye candy) will remain viewable somewhat behind the 30% window transparency.

[Durandal_VI]

Yeah, there are times things can be overly bright and cause eye strains.

Some things that helped me:

1. See if your monitor profile/review exists on TFT Central, try to calibrate the monitor in its settings (the buttons on the side, etc)

2. There may also be a .icc Color Management profile that can be loaded into Windows as well.

3. Play with brightness slider in game. I found that in some areas, normal looks best, but in others, a very slight decrease will make a world of difference with eye strain. With a calibrated monitor, I don’t need to move the slider much at all, just over the R on the reset button, and the difference is massive. Any further decreases may make things like bubbles really hard to see.

[Kaivarian_Coste]

if you watch ccp’s twitch streams, it’s apparent that alot of their devs / decision makers don’t play the game, at least to an appreciable extent. obvious problems like this aren’t even on their radar.

[Neugeniko]

Not true, I turn off 3D and run out of memory from the bugs!