Flare Reduction

[MacThule]

I love all the beautiful flare effects - please don't lose these! But. It would be very helpful to have a hotkey for a reducing or muting the flare effect on the fly. Because I enjoy it most of the time, but then I try to mine a roid near a star.... between the star and my own beams half of my screen can end up at full brightness. It's like a flashlight in the face - unpleasant.

 

[Dire Venom]

I love all the beautiful flare effects - please don't lose these! But. It would be very helpful to have a hotkey for a reducing or muting the flare effect on the fly. Because I enjoy it most of the time, but then I try to mine a roid near a star.... between the star and my own beams half of my screen can end up at full brightness. It's like a flashlight in the face - unpleasant.

Yup, having a bunch of keys you can assign custom settings like this would be great.
I find that I often have to disable shadows and other features just to be able to see where I'm building.
There's also the issue with building with black hull.... you don't know what's going on half the time O_O

 

[OfficialCoding]

Yup, having a bunch of keys you can assign custom settings like this would be great.
I find that I often have to disable shadows and other features just to be able to see where I'm building.
There's also the issue with building with black hull.... you don't know what's going on half the time O_O

Yup and lighten mode doesn't really help

 

[Edymnion]

Yeah, for dark hulls in shadows, only advice I can give is to actually build with a different color entirely and then use the mass replace when you're done to get the color you wanted.

Looks kind of silly building in pink, but it gets the job done.

 

[MacThule]

So... good comments on lighten mode and building colors.

My OP was actually about piloting near a star and using mass beam arrays. It gets so bright now it literally makes me want to look away while I'm mining. I find myself mining 'roids and looking around the room because 40-60% of my screen is just a featureless, white glare shining in my face. Performing a routine activity like mining shouldn't make people want to look away. I love the flare effects, but... too many is insane.

Our astronauts today have tinted visors... I wish I had such advanced tech in Starmade. Nothing at all to do with building, I just want a button to halve or quarter the flare effect on the fly as if I had put down a tinted visor. So that I'm not giving myself cataracts by mining or flying near stars.
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Looks kind of silly building in pink, but it gets the job done.

I use the pink thing too sometimes. Mostly for marking planar intersections and key point in my build though. I tend to build in grey.

 

[Nosajimiki]

So... good comments on lighten mode and building colors.

My OP was actually about piloting near a star and using mass beam arrays. It gets so bright now it literally makes me want to look away while I'm mining. I find myself mining 'roids and looking around the room because 40-60% of my screen is just a featureless, white glare shining in my face. Performing a routine activity like mining shouldn't make people want to look away. I love the flare effects, but... too many is insane.

Our astronauts today have tinted visors... I wish I had such advanced tech in Starmade. Nothing at all to do with building, I just want a button to halve or quarter the flare effect on the fly as if I had put down a tinted visor. So that I'm not giving myself cataracts by mining or flying near stars.
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I use the pink thing too sometimes. Mostly for marking planar intersections and key point in my build though. I tend to build in grey.

I'm okay with stars being unpleasantly bright... since they are stars... but I think with beams automated flare intensity might be better. Because a 20 block slavager is just a bright as a doom beam, it makes problems when you fire 200 of them. Instead, I think smaller beams should have more of a thin profile like the old beam and the flare should scale up with weapon size. That way the total flare intensity of a a 1k beam would look similar to a waffle of 500 20 block salvagers, or maybe even have the flare effect fall off all together below a certain weapon size to make waffles not burn up people's graphics cards.

 

[MacThule]

Because a 20 block slavager is just a bright as a doom beam, it makes problems when you fire 200 of them.

Exactly this. I didn't notice a problem until I started using my 600 output heavy miner. I get serious white-out from it. Yet stars are nice. And the beams are nice in small amounts.

People's tolerance/appetite will vary between individual players and probably change over time even within some individual players though and it definitely can be "Too Much" - enough to be physically unpleasant to look at, which is why I ended up thinking that a player-controlled toggle, an invisible GUI hotkey (maybe even stick it in the radial somewhere as well) would be best in terms of UX and player-perspective simplicity.

Then as I fly around scouting I can keep it at full, but if I go mining I can toggle it to reduced or off at nearly the speed of thought, and when a fight breaks out I can crank it back up to full just as fast and enjoy the glorious lightshow (the new weapon effects are seriously nice looking compared to the old ones. Texture and UI changes looking bomb as well).

 

[Nosajimiki]

Simplicity is actually why I think auto scaling is better. A macro-key is fine for players who already know about it, but this is the kind of problem that would bother new players on day one, and have them form negative opinions about the game until day 90 when they finally learn there is a macro for that.

Auto scaling also prevents the problem where beams currently look retardedly big on fighters.

Also, adding a macro might still be a good idea though, but I would see that as more relevant for people who want to see those big sexy effects when a battle is a sure thing, but want to turn it off when they need to save their processing power for game physics or clear up their hud in larger battles.