Zero-K Going HDR (Warning: Image heavy)

While this hasn't reached the point of going stable yet, it's now nearly complete. This will be part of the deferred shading (dynamic lights) widget, and will include full bloom and HDR support. Bloom will depend on HDR for technical reasons, and since it doesn't make much sense otherwise.

While HDR is more expensive than not, it offers at least two tangible advantages when it comes to dynamic lights.

1: Smoothness. HDR eliminates the grainy artifacts that currently plague dynalights, and also make the falloff of the lights considerably smoother.

2: SHINY!!! I included a function which shifts super bright lights toward white. Currently if you stack 100 scorcher beams on top of each other all you get is a grainy orange blob. With HDR they will make a smooth firey white flash almost like a lens flare. Overall the look is very starwars-ish, esp with higher white intensity for red beams like scorp and bandits. Lots of things are much shinier.

However there are also two major disadvantages. The first is that it's more expensive, although it's optional and you can turn it off to save on performance. The second is that the HDR tone mapping algorithm that makes the lights so shiny and smooth also causes irreversible color shifts which are difficult to correct even partially. Partial color correction is about all I've managed (and also adds to the expense).

Another minor disadvantage is that some not-so-great effects end up looking worse, either by contrast or by accentuation. Ground flash effects are really bad, and it also demonstrates a distinct need for proper explosion dynalights. Wyvern/tacnuke explosions also look bad. I haven't actually tested silencer but perhaps I should.

TL;DR::
I think I had bloom turned all the way up for this on accident. It's still about average scorcher shinies though.


Also overbloomed, but bright!
















I think pene needs a dynalight.


The following screenshots are a direct comparison between LDR, HDR, and HDR+Bloom:

Scorpion Comparison:




Scorcher Comparison:




BONUS SHINIES!! After a short time step:

The size/brightness of the effect is closely related to the lights that are used. Also ZK's units and buildings badly need remaking anyway, I'm just piling up more excuses. :)

EDIT: also if you look at the comparison shots you can see that the size of the effects hasn't actually changed. I think the dynalights used for scorp's multistunner are probably not well configured. In practice what you see is more like bright flashes though, which looks pretty cool. It's much cooler in motion than can be conveyed through screenshots.

Good job Aeonois! Small improvement, big effects, makes it look far more realistic than before, however, I would like to say you might need to bring the brightness down, scorchers heatray looks more like a lightbulb than a heatray...
However, Lightning looks much better because it's meant to be bright

Everything that is rendered prior to DrawScreenEffects gets run though the HDR machine, which is pretty much everything. However things that are rendered in LDR don't get all the effects and tend to lose strength.

I've done roughly as much tuning as I reasonably can with the HDR/bloom shaders, and mostly I'll be focusing on improving performance from now on. Tuning and/or making use of the effects is mostly in the jurisdiction of dynalights, which is not something I've messed with directly.

quote: However things that are rendered in LDR don't get all the effects and tend to lose strength.

What is controlling whether something is rendered in LDR or HDR? Is is just a matter of whether its shader lets its colours go above 1.0?

I think this looks bad on lasers. They just become pallid and you lose the vivid hues.

I think this looks good on things that represent heat. The explosion on the right side here, the flame here, and the rocket exhausts here are very nice.

quote: I think this looks bad on lasers. They just become pallid and you lose the vivid hues.

Please note that in pretty much all of the above screenshots with scorpions that its tail lightning and/or multistunner was firing at the same time, so what you're actually seeing is the lasers stacked with other lights. Normally they aren't that bright. I'll post some extra pics highlighting lasers later.

Hot stuff! Shinier is better, it hides the bad 3d. I love HW2 where the explosions can engulf the whole battlefield with their shininess.

If you want to show how lasers look then post an image of a firing LLT aeonios.

Lasers! The llt's light isn't even that bright to begin with though. You can only really see them on whiter maps like CCR or moonQ.