Friday Facts #168 - Nightvision Nightmare

[Marcus Aseth]

If a lot of people don't want to bother with an aspect of the game because they just want the sandbox build experience on a persistend day, that's a legit choice.

I'm stating my point of view from a guy who like the mix of build AND survival.

So do i, really like the survival aspect. But how do you build in the dark if you are too lazy to lamp every place?

quoting my suggestion in some previous reply :

I would also argue that would be cool to have a second light type to place that is more powerful and covers more range compared to the standard one.

Maybe have it cover a very large range but with less power, details left to the devs. Shouldn't be too much of a drag to drop some poles and one of these, I think

And quoting rolfl:

That's a great suggestion, but take it further, and introduce a new "medium electric pole" that has a light included on it

And keep in mind this solutions won't still replace nightvision for fights, because creeps still comes out from pitch black, just a bit further out from your construction area compared to where it would have been otherwise.

[DeathMers]

Why not implement more nightvisions types in one item - it is just a filter, so if you can choose (keybind) whatever is best for you in already crafted NV is the best way of game development IMHO. And you skip the mod using phase. For example, i dont wanna play with mods, perhaps later, but now i wanna play only vanilla.

[Doublespin]

I would also argue that would be cool to have a second light type to place that is more powerful and covers more range compared to the standard one.
Bulding a solid light network FIRST and ALWAYS, nightvision as LAST RESORT for forced night fights. Anyway, only my opinion.

That's a great suggestion, but take it further, and introduce a new "medium electric pole" that has a light included on it.... similar to "street lights", of sorts.

Combining the lights and electric poles would be a very convenient way to distribute both power and light.

I'm sure you will like this mod
https://mods.factorio.com/mods/letthere ... ctricPoles

For the NV topic: I really like the gray scale. The night-day cycle is still visiable and its really pleasant/cool looking.

[Tolrin]

I made an account just to comment on this. Night vision has always bugged me in factorio because you spend resources and consume power armor slots to solve something that isn't really a problem. It never really gets dark enough to need lights or night vision, indeed in the current implementation and in all of the various alternatives presented in this thread the night vision is harder to see things in than the regular darkness. Unless you either make darkness much more of a problem, or make night vision less obfuscating it will never be a desirable technology to actually use.

[pawel.dawidowski]

I like the suggestion of a separate slot with different kind of googles. And since the gui overhaul is planned maybe a good solution would be to have an inventory for player like in good old xcom series, instead of a few boxes at bottom right of the screen:

[Ironhair]

I liked the 2nd pic over the final one..
------------------------------------------------
Next we tried to darken only the red and blue channels when nightvision is on. This will make the picture green without losing contrast and we can drop the green overlay. We kept “not applying effect onto lighted area” logic and it started to look interesting.
------------------------------------------------

The final picture, while looking cool isn't fun or nice to see for hours to play through.
The second picture while it didn't have a perfect night vision feel to it, still had a touch in non lighted areas and was much more bearable in lighted areas.

[Marcus Aseth]

By the way, I stated my suggestion but I did not said what I think about the images presented by the devs.

Honestly I don't like them all for a simple reason, the reason is that is like the devs are trying to get rid of nightime, it is just like playing during daytime but with a weird green color, and while I can recognize this is a welcome improvement from people who main focus is building and don't care about combat or survival and would immediatly get rid of those component if they could, from the perspective of a guy who bought the game because presented 50% as survival during the trailer, then that nightvision simply kills the experience of surviving for me.

So I think that devs first need to decide if they want to roll with their original idea of building/surviving (50-50) or if they want to wash away the surviving aspect (which at the moment is the weaker one) to make the "builders only" happy.

A thing is for sure, will not be easy to please both of your audience at the same time since they want opposite things in most things

[Darloth]

Another vote for MiloRK's version here, especially with highlighted biters.

More bits-and-pieces tech like this is always something I like to see in games as upgrade paths, so more gear that modifies how the game looks / feels would be appreciated, I apparently like modular things

[RobertTerwilliger]

I never use nightvision because it hurts my eyes ; )
But both new images aren't any better, honestly.
Thanks for all that work, but if I had to choose between three, I'd vote for the first one.

I think about some computer reality extender, rather than nightvision (kinda google goggles): Lower than certain light level objects can have colored outline, color based on type. Say, biters red, enemy faction entities violet, trees and rocks green, assemblers yellow etc.
Maybe decrease glow brightness with distance.
You can even make biters highlight always when their sprite is overlaped by another sprite, 'cause they like lurking in trees ; )
The equipment can be called "personal scanning radar" or so.

[Kelderek]

TL;DR: Nightvision should be what it is: a nightvision.

With that in mind I would like

This is pretty much perfect

This is by far the best version I've seen and really the only one that I would want to actually use in game. Greyscale is so much easier on the eyes, but I like that you can see mostly normal color when in lighted areas. This is much better than green.

So I agree, it's pretty much perfect for Factorio.

[vanatteveldt]

My 2 cents

- It should be able to light up the constructed area of your base without too much hassle to get a playing experience the is close to "almost day". Industrial lighting is not about placing little light bulbs here and there . Good suggestions have been electricity poles with integrated lighting and more powerful lights. I would also not be against making all assemblers have built-in lighting so you only need to take care of the space between them.

- Outside the base, the night should be longer, darker, and scarier. Now, on one monitor I can play mostly undisturbed at night, while at another monitor it is too dark to walk around my own base. I think it would be good to make night even darker, and also make biters more likely to attack, more dangerous, or more difficult to hit. Adding floodlights to the perimeter should mitigate this by helping the turrets aim. Ideally, floodlights should activate on detecting movement so they double as a sort of warning sensor. Bright lights should also act as a repellent, not stopping attacks of course, but making them wait longer to attack (and as a consequence have more biters in a wave).

- Nightvision should only be useful outside the base. I like the heat vision thing posted above, where all terrain is visible but dark, and biters stand out. Inside the base , using or not using night vision should make hardly any difference.

This is the atmosphere we need: A full lit up base, where inside it is brighter than a thousand suns, but outside it is pitch black and scary.

chemplant by night

[ssilk]

That's great!

That's why I think a pinch of this

wouldn't be so bad as it looks.

[Marcus Aseth]

ssilk I think that that's an awful image and idea.
A thing is to have a well lit base, another thing is to have lights so strong that they completely obliterate the image you're watching at the point you can't tell what's underneat the light.
Doesn't work like this, even in a well lit place you still see what's going on and can tell different things apart.
I can't even tell what's under those light on the left, and I hope your reply is a form of humor or trolling or something like that...

[ssilk]

ssilk I think that that's an awful image and idea.
A thing is to have a well lit base, another thing is to have lights so strong that they completely obliterate the image you're watching at the point you can't tell what's underneat the light.

Haha... do you really? ... lol ... I said "a pinch". And I mean, the slight blending of the lights in the first pic - which looks good (of course).
And all I beg is some imagination to see the similarity between both pics, but it is there!
Maybe this helps, to see, what I see:

viewtopic.php?f=6&t=5108 Lights for devices

It is my opinion, that lights in Factorio are totally underestimated (see for example viewtopic.php?f=6&t=1089 or viewtopic.php?f=6&t=3814 ) and the Factorio team should solve first THAT, before thinking to a good looking night-vision.

[Marcus Aseth]

oh, do you mean a bloom effect? like in the image below:



Then I can understand, though I wonder how it will actually turns out, because if I get it right here we are talking of a game made of flat 2d pre-rendered sprites and no 3d shapes (correct me on this if I'm wrong), so is more like a flat "light" overlay?... but maybe it can add to it, if subtle and not overdone(otherwise it will actually overwhelm the sprite and makes them hard to see at all I think)

[ssilk]

oh, do you mean a bloom effect? like in the image below:

... subtle and not overdone(otherwise it will actually overwhelm the sprite and makes them hard to see at all)

Well, I don't care about the name of this. For me it is the effect of looking into lights at night.
Hm.
When you are young this is not so strong, as if you are over 40.

[MeduSalem]

I looked the stuff up now since I didn't really know about how these effects are called either, since I'm no optical expert.

Lens flares:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lens_flare
Seems like they come into being because of how light that comes from off center is broken by the lense.

Blooms:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom_(shader_effect)
Blooms on the other hand seem to try to simulate the strange effect of light bleeding onto surrounding surfaces.

Difraction Spikes:

The things from the Chemical plant seem to originate from this phenomenon.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffraction_spike
They happen due to diffraction of light around the support framework of the secondary mirror in cameras with telescope optics.

Probably all happen... they seem to appear to go together naturally depending on the camera equipment.


Interesting what one can learn... Knowledge no one needs in daily life except if you are a photographer or write rendering shaders.

[Marcus Aseth]

Interesting what one can learn... Knowledge no one needs in daily life except if you are a photographer or write rendering shaders.

or if you paint and struggle for better images or more realism, from the bloom page you linked "The effect produces fringes (or feathers) of light extending from the borders of bright areas in an image, contributing to the illusion of an extremely bright light overwhelming the camera or eye capturing the scene." Is kind of cool how just bleeding some of the light color into the surrounding area tricks the brain into thinking that that same color from some moments ago is now a crazy bright light

A crazy example of bloom from an oil painting (maybe NSFW, depends on your country I guess)--> https://cdnb3.artstation.com/p/assets/i ... 1475319473

I'm blinded!

[bk5115545]

This effect is fairly easily implemented via a shader provided there's a lightmap already in GPU memory. I'm not a GLSL expert so here's a Python version (assuming intensity is the lightmap and maxes at 255). This should be pretty easy to do with a fragment shader.

Code: Select all

for x,y in screen:
  r,g,b = pre_lighting_rgb[x][y]
  average = (r+g+b)/3
  r = (r*intensity[x][y]/255+average*(1-intensity[x][y]/255))
  g = (g*intensity[x][y]/255+average*(1-intensity[x][y]/255))
  b = (b*intensity[x][y]/255+average*(1-intensity[x][y]/255))
  draw_pixel(x,y,r,g,b)

My preference goes to image 2. Though it looks wrong because the RGB channels are modified directly. Instead, the nightvision areas should be lighted based on their luminosity. This should then be blended into the unlighted areas. The luminosity can be multiplied by a nightvision_color, to add a green tint for example.

The GLSL pseudocode I've come up with:

Code: Select all

uniform bool nightvision_enabled;
uniform vec4 nightvision_color;

in vec4 color;
in float lightness;
out vec4 result;

void main(void) {
  result = lightness * color;
  if (nightvision_enabled) {
    // Compute luminosity
    float y = dot(color, vec4( 0.2126, 0.7152, 0.0722, 0 ));
    // Enhance dark areas
    result += (1-lightness) * y * nightvision_color;
  }
}

Thank you Lilly. I knew it would be much easier in a shader.

[MeduSalem]

A crazy example of bloom from an oil painting (maybe NSFW, depends on your country I guess)--> https://cdnb3.artstation.com/p/assets/i ... 1475319473

I'm blinded!

I find the motif of the picture strangely distracting from the actual effect you are trying to show.