Light Problem

Warhammer 40,000: Darktide General Discussion
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First of all, about OS different from proprietary trash. It simply works weird on linux. I sure you don’t care about linux at all, so perhaps you can just skip this section, but any way I would say about it. I am usng archlinux with plasma6 (wayland). In all cases I am literally unable to write anything in steam overlay. At all. Well you actually might say that it’s proprietary engine’s fault which you can’t change/access internal resource of it, but no. Magicka 2, which was built on the same engine, works totally fine. (Meanwhile in Vemintide 2 I can’t even have access to overlay).

Next issue: performance problems. And this is not due to my hardware—I’m running an RTX 4070. For comparison, The game about mushroom zombies (With a girl named Ellie as main hero in post-apocalyptic world, part II, you know this game), works fine on high graphics settings. But let’s assume this is Proton’s fault and move on.

The next problem: screen transmission. Occasionally, it messes up the screen resolution, causing compositor issues. The result: a black screen or a crash when trying to take a screenshot. Any screenshot application simply fails (crashes) due to mistransmission.

And yet another in-game issue: NVIDIA DLSS / RTX cannot be enabled. Turning it on crashes the game client consistently. The only solution is to reset all settings to default, which is extremely inconvenient. There are many such issues, I’ve only mentioned a few of them. I’ve read in the internet that this game engine supposedly allows native Linux compilation, but I haven’t tried it myself.

So, after Linux issues were covered, let’s move on to the real problems: lighting in the game.

INB4: I have everything set to high, but without RTX and DLSS, because it simply doesn’t work for me (as explained above). We spawn in the Hub. Everything seems fine… right? So, let’s go.

I will not say anything about the sky itself and other similar things which common player would notice only when he would start to directly searching into it, like if they were constantly looking up. So, let’s get started.

First, we look down. Here are two light sources above us. And here is no shadows. At all.

Picture related (1): Blue arrows are the light sources. Red is where shadows should theoretically be. https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/1367565741959942216/1405506991283241060/image.png?ex=689f13e3&is=689dc263&hm=cc55d9ae7f0d0aac709276b0d3f9882a27e884501e143e725450a8eed9f304a7&Yes, I know, that’s very inaccurate and rough, but still. In the game itself, there really are no shadows here. So, we are moving on to the next point, we finally see them.

Picture related (2): https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/1367565741959942216/1405509583690141716/image.png?ex=689f164d&is=689dc4cd&hm=a87b107caa3158bda7883470e1dd567776306257b6688ebabf43617196052b54& As you can see, both my character and an NPC standing here cast shadows. But let’s dig deeper. Here’s a screenshot from the starting location of another spaceships-related game.

Picture related (3): https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/1367565741959942216/1405512433145085972/image.png?ex=689f18f5&is=689dc775&hm=896c911c81b94355168bf21c91bccbec9943ffb8edc7007a0eee11b770ec6380& You can notice the difference between shadows in Darktide and this game, right? This technology being using in Darktide, being called “Faking shadows”. If anybody interested, just check “Fake shadows UE5” on youtube. Weird thing, isn’t it? Even this horrible spaceships game has good shadows, but Darktide don’t….

Next, we move forward and we see another light source. That’s soft candlelight. IIt’s brighter than the mechanical (electric) lights for some reason (WHY?!). And yet again, there is no shadow, as you can see, when you get closer.

Picture related (4): https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/1367565741959942216/1405512896162566288/image.png?ex=689f1963&is=689dc7e3&hm=ed0bdd7c943554a88b6ba21830bb5ba996728cba5b95b65b66f9440b6e1ec232& Then, we walk to another place and yet again, here is no shadows

Picture related (5): https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/1367565741959942216/1405513144264298526/image.png?ex=689f199e&is=689dc81e&hm=304669e7e8534fb36709f201758d8d18c7aa006d569921db9c9a9d63f1bbacae& And then to another light source

Picture related (6): https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/1367565741959942216/1405513330873073684/image.png?ex=689f19cb&is=689dc84b&hm=dc415d380b93eb318ce00cc49d6bbbc07815e6e5ea6640077d7a683635d8b180& Okay, let’s stop now with that. Everybody understand everything at this point. Moreover, you see some shadows on the background on the last screenshot. I actually want you to see where these shadows are coming from. So, we lean forward a bit and we can see some sort of an invisible sun. Which would totally blind you, but it’s actually invisible. It blinds you, but you can’t see anything here, when you are trying to hide from that lens flare.

Picture related (7): https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/1367565741959942216/1405513544719401031/image.png?ex=689f19fe&is=689dc87e&hm=eea7c92c74addc5cd0934079dd487a981f6ff42470eedf4b7ad9d89a930ea08f& As you can see on the picture #7, I am not doing anything, but moving camera a bit to the right, less than 0.3cm of mouse movement, to change the view and actually to hide that lens flare which blinds me. The question is: What exactly is that lens flare source, if here is nothing outside? An Emperor? Maybe… If so, the Emperor’s light works well, letting me see everything.

Picture related (8): https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/1367565741959942216/1405513704342290492/image.png?ex=689f1a24&is=689dc8a4&hm=8a5894d42483eb559edd4ffe0dfd64a512330172d078d2145800e729df096554& However, moving slightly to the side, I’m completely in darkness, I can’t see anything! I am hidden from Emperor’s light and here is only darkness. The Emperor’s light is only at my background and it never reaches me. Even green mechanical light from hologram reaches my back and the floor, but nothing illuminates me directly.

Picture related (9): https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/1367565741959942216/1405513932579274855/image.png?ex=689f1a5a&is=689dc8da&hm=12a79354842f26461a0c6b9f67da521e4d46dff05ff5137c17ff0cd5e29065b2& Let’s get futher in the dark heresy. The light here comes from the lamp in top of the door (blue arrow as usual). Shadows are not existing as well.

Picture related (10): https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/1367565741959942216/1405514155112271935/image.png?ex=689f1a8f&is=689dc90f&hm=dd090f59d0f48d42a0e35d141293379c6ecc01995879f74aae2495092f7101f0& Okay, enough with the Hub. Let’s get forward, we’re going to main thing – to the mission. Here everything should be acceptable…. right? Bro, here it’s even worse! In ALL cases character don’t have shadows AT ALL! Even when my teammates do have them. That’s weird as hell…

Rest in comments

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Picture related (11): https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/1367565741959942216/1405514416795156520/image.png?ex=689f1ace&is=689dc94e&hm=a8f1d4c53fee35cda296b624adabc439f8d2054a7e8ea9d6e0326b6456dbf325& But hey, may be in other cases it’s good? Well, let’s move forward then. As you can see, here is a dark room, with light source from the roof. Also here is illusionary light source from the medical station. Guess what? Only the fan casts a shadow.

Picture related (12): https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/1367565741959942216/1405514601738670110/image.png?ex=689f1afa&is=689dc97a&hm=7a7dfd4ac5360ff6864dc5f547c2fd4b98898a351394c5fc8c0bef0683c7c64b& Okay, enough about shadows, even tho you don’t see shadows even in the loading screen.

Picture related (13): https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/1367565741959942216/1405514807196647508/image.png?ex=689f1b2b&is=689dc9ab&hm=b800018b9c3a21f5f023e036da4459f7555ce7851d1dd35181ca51516116df43& Now let’s talk about the main problem: the light itself. And it is really harmful. This is why I’m dedicating time to this. I’m not the only one affected; many community mods exist to reduce these light effects because the default setup creates a bad experience.

Related picture (14): https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/1367565741959942216/1405515242372595722/image.png?ex=689f1b92&is=689dca12&hm=9e6d5157ffd6bd60851a465d4c74e1efc570367ec952ae1d99a5a3346b579b07& Do you see anything on the 14th picture? Good for you, because I can’t see anything here. I am unable to see where am I and what’s the environment around. It’s way too dark. And this is the common thing in the game.

You might argue that in most cases it’s fine, but it depends on the viewing angle. From other perspectives, it might appear brighter, but in this spot, from all angles, it’s this bad.

This is caused by a combination of eye adaptation/auto-exposure and post-process volume manipulations.

For example:

  • In Room #1, if lights are on, looking into Room #2 (lights off) shows nothing.

  • Entering Room #2 triggers exposure changes, revealing the interior without blinding you with Room #1’s brightness.

Is here any better solution? Yeah, it calls path tracing, which mirrors light realistically. For example:

A box near a door gets illuminated when you open the door from the outside.

You close the door - box loses light.

You then open from the inside → box gets much less light than in the step #1.

Picture related (15): https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/1367565741959942216/1405515666907463845/image.png?ex=689f1bf8&is=689dca78&hm=6c728e4e5c3fefa6334e629d2e239d3322fe766c8c80c15e10ee2e6d9c6da156& Why? Because of what I just said. The light is mirrored from the door and went to the box. But hey, you might think about GPU and stuff. Here is an old solution for that, which already exist and does not load GPU so much as raytracing (shadows) / pathtracing (light). Which was used even before RTX came in. It’s being called baking the lightmaps and SSAO with fake light bounces. You can see that in games made on CryEngine. I won’t mention the name of this games series, to avoid free advertisement, but you already got which games I’m talking about. But for now, we have what we have here. Majority of game locations are either way too bright (like 20% of them) or way too dark (80%). Here’s an example:

Picture related (16): https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/1367565741959942216/1405515927705096263/image.png?ex=689f1c36&is=689dcab6&hm=89b76811a356ec0ba7f7a87be43e3e6666b0ac1098bea576f6fd913c89a5eee2& It’s very hard to see anything here, I think you won’t argue with me. And you might say, “Just increase brightness.” But that makes already bright areas unbearable, straining your eyes. Even with a €300 monitor and a high-end PC, I experience these problems. Imagine cranking brightness to see the dark areas, this is what you get:

Picture related (17): https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/1367565741959942216/1405516184069214288/image.png?ex=689f1c73&is=689dcaf3&hm=fcab2ed21d9c6bf163aebf34dcfb02c72b700f49df9b1b5ad3778479f1900879& Uncomfortable, right? For me, extremely so. To even look at this screenshot. Not sure about you. But that’s my bet. But that’s not all the factors. We also forgot about exposure change. You know, here is a thing called “Stroboscopic effect”.

In short:The stroboscopic effect is a visual phenomenon caused by aliasing that occurs when continuous rotational or other cyclic motion is represented by a series of short or instantaneous samples (as opposed to a continuous view) at a sampling rate close to the period of the motion. It accounts for the “wagon-wheel effect”, so-called because in video, spoked wheels (such as on horse-drawn wagons) sometimes appear to be turning backwards. [Wikipedia]

When it’s intense enough to cause discomfort or trigger seizures in people with photosensitive epilepsy, it’s specifically flagged as photosensitive triggering content.

And you know what? The fact is that it really can provoke epilepsy even if you never had it. It already happened and being called “Pokemon Shock”. You can google this incident. In short, one of the pokemon episodes had similar thing, but a bit more intense, which caused a lot of childrens to end up hospitalized with a lot of different symptoms, like seizures, convulsions, blindness, headache, unconsciousness and other. So this thing is really serious and such things with lights is not the one you can safely play with. I am myself experiencing headaches during playing Darktide. Actually, I had it, before downloading some mods and adjusting some settings. But with these mods/settings I don’t have more than half of all effects. For example, I can’t see the fire right now. Because you simply can’t turn one specific effect off, you can only turn off the entire pattern, e.g. for example “Particles”. You know what I mean. That’s like you can’t explicitly make one single texture have 1024x1024 resolution. You can only making all of them became lowres.

But to make this post, I turned everything ON and made every setting to High. But well bro, what I noticed that a lot of FX things are just a sprite effects. For example fire

Picture related (18): https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/1367565741959942216/1405516475686715483/image.png?ex=689f1cb9&is=689dcb39&hm=1538d31e7579eb47943550c9dd3de618027b3b59c5b0fe412b980927d6090fdf&Or smoke

Picture related (19): https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/1367565741959942216/1405516753555161180/image.png?ex=689f1cfb&is=689dcb7b&hm=acde767159605ee8ea7b92cf790ab5375638387942799287c0bf0b2505910bcd& Ambient occlusion quality is set to High, as like every single other graphical setting, as mentioned above.After the painful mission, I am back in the hub. I want to change my character’s appearance and I go to the specific room. And know what? Yet again, here is complete darkness.

Picture related (20): https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/1367565741959942216/1405517127502270464/image.png?ex=689f1d54&is=689dcbd4&hm=6fa54b621d5a55939538b77d5e0f3b0068f0f123b502e0582a2a988c6f6707eb& So, we almost ended. I have some more words to say before actual conclusion. Just look at my face shadows and lights before we proceed.

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Picture related (21): xhttps://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/1367565741959942216/1405517384105594912/image.png?ex=689f1d91&is=689dcc11&hm=207f7f7c05dea5c37fd2dc1d69cc2d50c3d3b529e3722120c8436aca784b86ff&
The first is about the hair, lmao. Did you ever look in the mirror? I mean, the hair reflects the light only in one case: When it’s full of oil. Why I brought it here? Well, because it’s related to light as well. Here is a thing called “Specular maps” for textures. This is the additional layer of texture which reflects the light. And you know what? Hair don’t reflect light in reality. But in this game it does… For some reasons…

In gamedev, light is sometimes being used to highlight the objects which you can interact with (For example you can see a lot of such things in the game about post-apocalypse with a cute girl as a main character, you know, the one with mushroom zombies). Here, in the Darktide, light is being used to show the darkness of the future. Of the warp superiority. But not for the things it actually being used in other games. You would never see such techniques in Darktide. In Darktide, you have markers which appears on the specific range instead of that.

So, the conclusion itself:

The light in this game made VERY horrible. This is one of WORST lights I’ve ever seen in the industry. Don’t get me wrong. Not saying that game itself is very bad. The animations here are made good. You can feel them, animations are kinda eyecandy here. Never seen lowres/lowquality texutres here. But light… it’s horrible. Really horrible and embarassing for such studio. This light is very bad, ugly, harmful for eyes and poorly implemented. The person which was responsible for light is incompetent at all in my eyes. And if you have such light problems, in my opinion, the best solution would be to just reduce that forced exposure adjustment and limit sparkles/particles/other “bright things” count. The visual fidelity remains the same, but eyes would not suffer anymore. Thank you for your attention, even tho I guess only players were reading this and nothing would be changed in this game at all. Because you know, it’s better to add OP dog breeder to get more cash instead of making game better. And well, I really tried to make things simpler here, I did not even cover field of view, tonemapping and other things, but any way it became so long and big, so sorry about that. And I have kind of a hope that at some day, this would be fixed and game would become playable without hours wasted on graphics adjustments and configuring the mods.