I've been following this thread closely ever since I posted and I feel like we've gone quite a bit off topic. We were supposed to find ways to show proper darkness to people with shaders disabled and additionally come up with strategies to prevent cheating. Not post pages of messages bitching about low-end hardware. If people can't use shaders, that's their loss.
This fog does not appear in the off setting. Fog use to be the standard for every setting until 2012 rolled out with shadows/shaders. Now fog was moved to minimum.
This I did not know. Why is the fog not enabled with shaders off? I actually had to check in-game because I did not believe you. What changed because the fog used to work before shaders came around?
In other words the two features, shadows and fog, that can be used to simulate darkness and indeed counteract people using shaders to brighten the screen, are only enabled for people with shaders on. I'm starting to see where all the bitching comes from. This sucks.
Refer to this post to see how ReShade can be used to nullify standard near-pitch-black lighting:
http://forum.blockland.us/index.php?topic=288315.msg8905041#msg8905041
Like I and others have mentioned before, making shadows pitch black prevents anyone from seeing anything in a shadow because you can't brighten any minor differences in brightness when there are none:
https://imgur.com/a/2ihWI
Here's a possible solution to the stealth problem (but not the darkness): fog.
- Low visible distance
- Zero fog distance
- White fog and sky
- All black lighting
- Sun under the world
This cannot be easily canceled out with shaders because the full range from black to white is present in the image. See the album:
https://imgur.com/a/9lxpCI can change the contrast a little bit with ReShade to push back the fog but the effect is not game breaking. In interiors (image #3) ReShade is actually detrimental. Sure you could probably write your own shaders to do some kind of edge detection or do more advanced stuff than just gamma/contrast/brightness.
Here the name of the game is hugging the wall. The closer your body is to another surface larger than your body, the more invisible you are. The extreme fog essentially turns the image into a depth buffer. See
image #4 where I'm standing next to a wall on the right side of the image in plain view. (The player model is actually quite a bit more visible in the game. Taking a screenshot somehow crushes the colors?) The same scene from the perspective of the player seen in image #4:
image #5. As you can see, standing out in the open makes you stand out more.
The fog rendering has a minor bug though. See these two images:
#3 &
#5Pay attention to the ground. Larger plates are lighter in color causing these jarring jumps in color.
However, this does not work when the shaders are off. (See the last three images.) Then I can just use the standard night brightening shaders.
The only solution I can think of is a server side setting that requires the clients to have at least the specified level of shaders enabled to connect. (It probably only makes sense to limit it to Minimum or Low.)
Poll