- Joined
- Oct 4, 2014
- Messages
- 94
- Reaction score
- 43
Let me start by telling the short story of how I got to where I am now in this line of thought. When I first started playing StarMade I found the lack of visual atmosphere on planets to be somewhat...um...immersion breaking. I took it upon myself to modify the atmosphere shader and essentially turn the opacity up to bring the daylight back (my temporary solution until an official fix happens). The end result wasn't super great, but it did bring the sky back more-or-less, but something was still not right. It occurred to me that not only was the sky lit incorrectly, but the ground was also missing ambient light. I officially know zipiddy doodah about shader code, but after applying my patented "just figure it out" method I was able to turn up the ambient light for every block everywhere simply by inserting a couple of lines of code into a single file. Here's a little comparison of my end result:
Now at this point you're probably wondering why I don't just make my modified shader into a mod and be done with it, but there are a couple of reasons why I wanted to put this out there to the community instead of doing that.
1. Although my shader works fine with bump-mapping it seems to disagree with the shadow shader. I'm sure someone who really knows what they're doing could probably do much better than the one I made.
2. It didn't take me long of playing like this to figure out that turning the lights up changes the gameplay quite a bit on planets. Most notable is the fact that you don't need to constantly drop lights to see what you're doing when you're underground (making mining go MUCH faster), but it also exposes caves and such that you otherwise would not have seen. While I personally found the light dropping thing to be extremely annoying it is a change that reaches far beyond my original intention of just making the planets feel more natural. I suppose whether it's good or bad is a matter of opinion.
So I'm mostly just curious to know what others think about this. I personally think the game feels a little better with a little ambient light (maybe not quite the 50% in that screenshot up there, but it's adjustable) because I hate to struggle to see things. Good, bad, ugly?
Now at this point you're probably wondering why I don't just make my modified shader into a mod and be done with it, but there are a couple of reasons why I wanted to put this out there to the community instead of doing that.
1. Although my shader works fine with bump-mapping it seems to disagree with the shadow shader. I'm sure someone who really knows what they're doing could probably do much better than the one I made.
2. It didn't take me long of playing like this to figure out that turning the lights up changes the gameplay quite a bit on planets. Most notable is the fact that you don't need to constantly drop lights to see what you're doing when you're underground (making mining go MUCH faster), but it also exposes caves and such that you otherwise would not have seen. While I personally found the light dropping thing to be extremely annoying it is a change that reaches far beyond my original intention of just making the planets feel more natural. I suppose whether it's good or bad is a matter of opinion.
So I'm mostly just curious to know what others think about this. I personally think the game feels a little better with a little ambient light (maybe not quite the 50% in that screenshot up there, but it's adjustable) because I hate to struggle to see things. Good, bad, ugly?
