Friday Facts #320 - Color correction

[Millefleur]

tl;dr Not all the changes are unwelcome, but lighter is better than more colourful if you want a brighter look.

I'm afraid I have to add my weight to the 'too much' camp. The grimy, industrial style of Factorio has always been part of it's unique attraction. I know it's subjective - I'm still trying to adjust to the the brighter coloured GUI of 0.17.

I don't mind a lighter look, (I can always turn my monitor brightness down a bit more) but the higher saturation is overdone veering towards 'plastic playground' territory. Instead of the previous cohesive feeling it's jarring, everything competing for attention. Some of the primary coloured things need less saturation than the originals, not more. Circuits in particular have always stood out too much on screen but I always thought any change would be to tone them down to match the overall look, not to have every thing else 'toned up' to compete!

The more interesting desert colour is welcome, it was very bland compared with the old yellow desert, but again looks oversaturated to me as do the other terrain changes - too far in the same orange direction as the desert. I was already struggling with the overwhelming primary brightness of the 0.17 trees, but occasional blue ones plonked amongst them is just... odd. I would love to see more alien-looking biomes, but as a cohesive whole that fit with the existing ones. In the screen shot the trees look too much like what they are - an afterthought in an otherwise recognisably 'earthlike' biome - but with potential to be a great addition to the game. Ironically the reason I don't use the Biomes mod is because I find many of the more interesting colours too bright and therefore out of keeping with the beautifully subdued art style of Factorio.

The new minimap colours are a mixed bag - I very much appreciate features - especially forests - being more visible, but again find the terrain colours very orange-y and oversaturated. A map should rapidly convey useful information, not try to replicate the world, and subtle terrain colours underneath helps highlight the useful stuff. I need to know at a glance if I'm heading towards the right resource patch or about to try and drive my car through thick forest, not which variety of grassland I'm on.

Lastly, the blue nighttime... ughh. Not as bad as the green night vision which I couldn't bear, but deliberately making everything shades of one colour is very aggravating, similar to the issues colourblind players have with differentiating otherwise identical objects. Playing outside the lit areas of your base should be difficult because it's dark, not because it's weirdly monotone.

Sorry I can't be more positive, I appreciate the passion and effort put in to polishing the game to be the best it can be, but I feel that these changes alter the gorgeous visual style of the game too much in their current form.

[Honktown]

Hmm people have mentioned this, but would the LUTs be moddable? I'm thinking of a mod like Visual Smog, so although things may be "bright and shiny", everything quickly can become grimy and dirty with pollution. A little bit of "if you want it clean, keep it clean". If it's all moddable, then those of us in disagreement with the change can work around it, though newbies would have to deal with the crayola view in opposition to what they're doing to the planet.

I'd like to point out that this is your main menu's background image. Not the cleanest and colorful depiction of a factory.

[J-H]

Yay, brighter Factorio! This is a good change.

[rantingrodent]

I think the new look is great and several people need to recalibrate their displays. The old colour correction always felt kind of...sleepy? to me. Like it had no energy. Limp. Dead.

Maybe some of the newfound dynamic range could be used to add some explicit dirt and grime details to things? Some more smudges and blackening in key places would be a much more visually pleasing way to communicate the same thing that was previous communicated by everything being greyish.

[Horatio]

I hope the filters also stay. If you make a biome of Mars, there will be some glow of the landscape, which will affect objects. If you make a script in the Dark Space genre, gloom is necessary.

[cpy]

It burns my eyes! I like subtle colors.

[malventano]

Maybe you should post a link to a good calibration tool as well, so everyone can set up their monitors correct? Otherwise you never know if the complains come from "too much" or "crap monitor"

Most modern higher end displays natively oversaturate colors, and have to be 'pulled back' to proper SRGB levels in order for content to look accurate. Folks on these types of miscalibrated displays will see the new changes as 'candyland'. Some displays will have an SRGB or equivalent mode that (mostly) fixes this for you. Those without that mode or without having calibration hardware can get closer to reality if their display is in the TFTCentral calibration profile database: https://www.tftcentral.co.uk/articles/icc_profiles.htm

[KingIonTrueLove]

The only thing I like is the new trees. But the rest of things I'm not a huge fan of tbh.

I have a 'professional' monitor, and i switch it between a blue light filter and normal mode, but I usually have it in low blue light mode. I'm gonna give my thoughts viewing the images from both modes. Along with a third generic monitor


Blue-filtered mode on 'professional' monitor: New colors look pretty bad in general, and the new night mode is so dark I can barely see anything now (it would force me to rush night vision even faster than I normally do). The new sand is one of the biggest offender imo, it turns into a weird dark orange.

Normal mode on 'professional' monitor: New colors mostly get a 'holy fluff its bright'. Like some things actually hurt my eyes to look at its so bright. Its probably why I usually default to blue light mode on most this with this monitor.

Normal mode on generic monitor: New colors get a 'meh', but I could probably live with it if i had to. The changes are mostly subtle other than a few things I will mention below.


Thoughts that affect all three monitor modes:
-Stone paths are quite washed out now.
-Chests and crates look way to bright and clean, this also goes for inserters.
-I actually kinda like the new assemblers and underground belt entrances.
-I love the new trees, it really hammers in the fact that you are tearing apart an alien world for your own benefit when those trees become dead. (Side-thought: would it be possible to have dirt and grass turn into sand over time in the same way that the trees become dead?)


In general though, I see this as especially being harmful to the eyes for anyone who plays this game for long periods of time. Also, those who try to counter that with blue light filters are hit the hardest with this new change.

[XRovertoX]

In hopes of providing useful criticism... I don't like this changes. Adding saturation and brightness might be a needed change, but the samples we got seem a little bit too much for my taste.
I've been playing Factorio for more than two years now and I pretty much agree with every change tweak and addition on every FFF I've read since then, until this one. I would surely welcome some visibility changes, subtle ones. That would really be an improvement. And I know this is not the final work, but as of it is right now it's way over brightened and over saturated.
The same goes with the blue tint of the night, too overdone for my liking.
I hope all this is open to discussion.

PS I'm seeing this in a properly calibrated monitor

[torham]

Hmm people have mentioned this, but would the LUTs be moddable? I'm thinking of a mod like Visual Smog, so although things may be "bright and shiny", everything quickly can become grimy and dirty with pollution. A little bit of "if you want it clean, keep it clean". If it's all moddable, then those of us in disagreement with the change can work around it, though newbies would have to deal with the crayola view in opposition to what they're doing to the planet.

I'd like to point out that this is your main menu's background image. Not the cleanest and colorful depiction of a factory.

The new and improved Factorio

[boskid]

The new and improved Factorio

This is rapidly approaching Diablo III, Pony level style.

[Tynach]

It would be a crime for me not to respond to this Friday Facts. Not only do I both love Factorio and use a calibrated monitor (and own my own colorimeter), but I've also spent the past few years writing colorspace conversion and manipulation code in GLSL, for fun.

A LUT is certainly one way to go about creating a difference between day and night, but I'm not convinced it's the best way to do it - especially when the transition from one to the other is gradual over a length of time. The use of a LUT implies you're wanting to avoid converting to and from linear light values for blending (because literally everything else would be a super inexpensive matrix multiply against the RGB values), but... It's incorrect to blend between plain RGB values and the RGB values those translate to when using the LUT, without converting both sides of the LUT into linear light values for the blend between them!

Yes, it very well might look good enough to blend between not using a LUT and using the LUT. But consider this example:

Say we have a dull red color, #B05A44, and we want to pretend to adapt the white point from a more bluish one (I found somewhere that old Sony CRT monitors had a white point with xy chromaticity coordinates of 0.283, 0.298, and that's roughly also somewhere along the 'daylight' variation of the blackbody radiation curve, so lets just use that) to D65, and then reduce the luminosity to 1/8th of its former value.

After converting the sRGB color above into a linear light value, performing both operations, and then turning it back into an sRGB color, we get #3F1E1A This is the color that winds up in our LUT to replace the above dull red color. It's much darker, and slightly bluer.

So, what about at the halfway point? For fairness (to the extent of being unfair, which I'll get to in a moment), lets try a few times at the linear light side of the comparison so that the final green channel value is the same as the 'naive' blending approach (where the naive approach just takes a direct average of the two RGB values).

Turns out, the naive approach of blending the two values together results in #773C2F... But the result should be something closer to #783C2E.

Not a major difference, mind you, but as the differences between the two colors grow, so does the difference in how they blend. Already we have a slight difference in hue between the two values.

Furthermore, this is specifically adjusting things so that the green channel is equal in both... And that's a pretty artificially skewed test. All pixels on the screen have to be darkened by the same amount, and you won't be adjusting it slightly to match a target green channel value for every single pixel. That'd be silly. The real halfway point when blending via linear light, turns out to be #663227 That's first converting sRGB's halfway point (127.5 out of 255) to linear light, and using that (about 0.214) as the factor instead of 0.5. Otherwise, the value turns out to be much brighter. When matching greens, I had to use a value of roughly 0.36.

[<NO_NAME>]

Yay! Factorio isn't monochrome anymore! I was waiting for this for a long time.

Now we only need some more upbeat music and maybe I won't require antidepressants anymore while playing.

[Zavian]

Unfortunately I also feel the new images are oversaturated. But I play games because they have interesting gameplay, so ultimately that is more important to me than the graphics.

[xng]

I've been waiting for this change for so so long, and the tooltip update that we got recently, I'm a happy dude now.

[Illiou]

I just looked at the image histogram of the old Factorio screenshot and am baffled: the upper third of brightness values is basically not used at all. Of course everything looks dull, given this low dynamic range. How in the hell did I not notice that before? I guess you really do get used to things pretty quickly...

Even in a dark industrial world things are bright when the sun shines on them - not dark gray. Actually even in the improved-color screenshot there is some more room upwards in dynamic range.

Maybe this newly found dynamic range can now be used to provide proper contrast between sun-lit and dirt-darkened parts.

[Sander_Bouwhuis]

I'm VERY happy to see this change! I've even used graphics mods in the past to have more saturation. I absolutely hate(d) the drab washed out look. If at all possible, maybe this could be a slider setting so that people can choose how much brighter they want the game to be (or go back to the drab look if they want).

[BinaryPulsar]

I never knew I needed this change until I saw it! Adding more saturation to factorio colours feels just like dusting an old picture; factorio looks so much fresher with a simple change! That being said, some of the items do look a little too bright. Besides that though, I really like how the environment looks less drab and gloomy. That was one of the things that always looked rather depressing to me after hours of gameplay, and the colour change makes the game feel so much more vibrant. I do still prefer the high-tech textures of mods like Angels, Yuoki and Pyanodons before adjustment to factorio rusty style, but this is already a great change.

[FixedGrey]

I have mixed feelings about the color change.
As a person with a color blindness it's already very difficult for me to distinguish between red and green circuit wires. This is the reason why i think something like a colorbling option should be added to the game.
I already have issues to see trees on the map preview and the new color scheme doesn't make it better.
As an example: I can see that there are trees on the left side of the slider but i barely see trees on the right side - only a few 'brighter' dots within the red circle https://imgur.com/a/L9Xi1kl
Instead of making it harder for colorblind people to distingish between colors you should focus on making the game more accessible for everyone. One step might be to add a proper colorblind mode.
This is also the reason why i use the 'colorblind circuit network' mod as a quality of life mod. It only changes the red and green wires to blue and yellow - even if you can't see the colors you can distinguish between them because of the brightness in the game.

As a colourblind player, I second the need for a colourblind mode (or something similar). I also use the colourblind circuit network mod. I've put up with having to use a mod since Factorio is still in early access, but I really think it would be a shame if more in-game accessibility options were not available before the game leaves early access (which, as mentioned in the blog, is coming sooner rather than later).

In addition to what was mentioned by Haphollas, I also have trouble with:

• Pollution on the map
• The lights on rail signals and train stops
• Train block indicators (i.e. what you see when you hold a rail signal)
• The different types of logistic chests

[Rebmes]

If I may weigh in, the color changes overall look pretty great to me, except for the night-time one. With that slider, the old colors look and feel way better than the weird new heavy blue draping everything.