GET RID OF THE HALLOWEEN DARK FILTER

[8bot]

it's awful, holy shit, it's terrible
mesons have ZERO effect essentially, that's how dark everything is by default, it strains the eyes to look at and just makes everything unbearable and awful and terrible.
FIX IT!!!

[Jacquerel]

are you not spooked

[8bot]

yeah it's on the verge of scaring me off the server

[dendydoom]

make it darker

[Imitates-The-Lizards]

I agree with the OP, but less dramatically. It's too dark, please return the normal lighting.

[TheFinalPotato]

no

[TheFinalPotato]

can fix that tho

[8bot]

Since my bitching and crying and pissing and moaning (and shitting) didn't seem to resolve anything, allow me to present my argument in a far more structured manner:

My complaints in the OP post are still in full force. It's far past 'mood lighting', it's actually detrimental to gameplay itself. Dark pipes, for example in the space cooling loop on metastation, blend into the atmosphere completely. Meson has hardly any effect - if a revealed tile is not DIRECTLY illuminated in light, it is hardly even a single step above pitch-black. Some stations, like Delta, have swathes of the station that are completely and utterly pitch black. Races that are meant to have night vision, like spiders for example, straight-up do not. They are borderline unplayable in the zones they are meant to have an advantage in.

The darkness is also straining to the eyes in a way that the normal lighting in this game simply is not. It's driven me, and several others, to not want to play on our servers not even because of the inconveniences it causes - but because it's actually physically painful after a time.

OOC on both servers I've played on (as well as Deadchat, and even IC chatter) is filled to the brim with people condemning this decision - and the fact that lots of people experiencing their first /tg/ Halloween think that the darkness is part & parcel of it, and feel like complaining is hopeless, erroneously believing they're 'going against tradition' or some shit.

There are quite literally zero upsides to having the lighting like this. It adds nothing to the mood, makes certain things quite literally unplayable, makes most other things a pain, hurts many peoples' eyes, and is generally just a damper on what is otherwise a lot of peoples' favorite times on the server.

I'm not a schizo screaming in the wind for once, I'm actually bringing this up in the best interests of everyone else in the community.

PLEEEAAAASE give us back the old lighting.

ALSO: It's impossible to sufficiently brighten things up. It'd be different if this was just something we could resolve with game mechanics, but flooding the halls with lights doesn't remedy it. We're just in the Dark Zone™ perpetually and it sucks.

[LEDDDriver]

snip

Don't bother. Currently maintainers are dead set that it being obnoxiously (artificially) difficult to do your job due to darkness is absolutely a gameplay feature.This applies to this case but is easily extended to fire alarms red light. I haven't had any luck with trying to convince certain people that those red lights are WAY TOO DIM to the point that they are detrimental to gameplay (which is you fixing the problem as engi/atmos) even when presented with proof of how stupidly dim the current lights are (since they do way more than add "atmospheric vibe"; you now have to bring external light sources as well, for no reason, which will be trivialized the moment the fire alarms are fixed).

Take it or leave it at the end of the day, plenty of other servers to game on. Or just build floodlights to counter the """""""""vibe """"""""""".

[8bot]

just build floodlights to counter the """""""""vibe """"""""""".

That's legitimately not enough. It's a filter applied over the screen or some shit; You literally cannot counteract it.

[LEDDDriver]

just build floodlights to counter the """""""""vibe """"""""""".

That's legitimately not enough. It's a filter applied over the screen or some shit; You literally cannot counteract it.

Literally

Take it or leave it at the end of the day, plenty of other servers to game on.

Remember when people were telling you that all you have to do is convince maintainers?

[Jacquerel]

Since my bitching and crying and pissing and moaning (and shitting) didn't seem to resolve anything, allow me to present my argument in a far more structured manner:

To be clear it did and there's a PR open to improve things as you requested it's just not a PR to remove it

[8bot]

Since my bitching and crying and pissing and moaning (and shitting) didn't seem to resolve anything, allow me to present my argument in a far more structured manner:

To be clear it did and there's a PR open to improve things as you requested it's just not a PR to remove it

That's fortunate, at least, thank you.

I'm actually logdiving to find examples of people complaining about the lighting, too, just so the coders and such are aware that there are plenty of people unhappy with it.

[8bot]

NSFW:

From Round 217653:
[2023-10-28 05:54:03.696] GAME-OOC: RedBaronFlyer/(RedBaronFlyer) "the halloween lighting is way, way too dark" (start area (8,248,1))
[2023-10-28 05:56:00.312] GAME-OOC: RedBaronFlyer/(RedBaronFlyer) "like you can be in a perfectly lit room and it's still too dark" (start area (8,248,1))
[2023-10-28 05:55:40.959] GAME-OOC: Glitchythenerd/(Glitchythenerd) "how to rid self of the filter" (start area (8,248,1))
[2023-10-28 05:55:42.962] GAME-OOC: Durst22/(Durst22) "shit is nearly unplayable" (start area (8,248,1))
[2023-10-28 05:55:36.540] GAME-OOC: Intrepidpotion/(Intrepidpotion) "its horrid" (start area (8,248,1))
[2023-10-28 05:56:02.153] GAME-OOC: Randumb Phantomb/(Randumb Phantomb) "and a filter than makes NVG unusable" (start area (8,248,1))
[2023-10-28 05:56:02.954] GAME-OOC: Randumb Phantomb/(Randumb Phantomb) "great" (start area (8,248,1))
[2023-10-28 06:53:39.093] GAME-SAY: Leif.Nobody/(Naen Nocturnae) (DEAD) "Halloween filter = eye strain" (Hydroponics (139,114,2))
[2023-10-28 05:58:32.621] GAME-OOC: Nukashimika/(Jennifer Maingood) "btw the halloween lightling makes playing a ghost awful" (Arrival Shuttle Hallway (50,129,2))


From Round 217650:
[2023-10-28 04:24:07.251] GAME-OOC: Glitchythenerd/(Charlie Haynes) "way too dark" (Prison Mess Hall (80,194,2))
[2023-10-28 05:25:32.188] GAME-SAY: Nukularpower/(Honky D Clown) (DEAD) "is it possible to turn the filter off" (Abductor Ship (225,21,13))
[2023-10-28 04:13:02.856] GAME-OOC: Overwatch_voice/(Has-No-Pigment) "I genuinely can't see anything over the halloween filter" (Atmospherics (174,114,2))

From Round 217646:
[2023-10-28 03:59:48.154] GAME-OOC: Inert Inertia/(Inert Inertia) "yeah mesons dont do anything" (start area (8,248,1))
-censored(world_topic logs)-
[2023-10-28 03:59:59.601] GAME-OOC: Inert Inertia/(Inert Inertia) "and the night vision quirk too, nvgs on the whole" (start area (8,248,1))
[2023-10-28 04:00:04.728] GAME-OOC: Grobnok/(Grobnok) "On icebox its worse because the filter and zlevels makes it so pits are just pitch black" (start area (8,248,1))


From Round 217671:
[2023-10-28 13:21:11.390] GAME-SAY: DrStankus/(Bob Bone) (DEAD) "this darkness was cool for a minute but i've had it" (Security Locker Room (202,126,2))

Naturally, you shouldn't take some bitching in OOC and deadchat to be a straight condemnation of the lighting - but, it is proof that it's impacting peoples' experiences besides the vocal minority in this thread.
I spent a few minutes ctrl-fing through logs because I certainly don't know how to parse that shit properly, but I don't want to obliterate my Saturday going through space game logs. I just want to obliterate my Saturday playing space game with bearable lighting.
Didn't include any IC bitching, of course, no matter how transparent it was.

[sinfulbliss]

I'll be real with you dawg, this is a skill issue. It's a week long just embrace the halloween darkness.

[TheFinalPotato]

Don't bother. Currently maintainers are dead set that it being obnoxiously (artificially) difficult to do your job due to darkness is absolutely a gameplay feature.This applies to this case but is easily extended to fire alarms red light. I haven't had any luck with trying to convince certain people that those red lights are WAY TOO DIM to the point that they are detrimental to gameplay (which is you fixing the problem as engi/atmos) even when presented with proof of how stupidly dim the current lights are (since they do way more than add "atmospheric vibe"; you now have to bring external light sources as well, for no reason, which will be trivialized the moment the fire alarms are fixed).

Take it or leave it at the end of the day, plenty of other servers to game on. Or just build floodlights to counter the """""""""vibe """"""""""".

Ok so like certain people is me I did that it's my fault but also bro we talked about this and agreed that fire lights are too dark. They're like that because the station used to be horribly overlit, I fixed it, but didn't account for it in the light values. I literally told you that I've just been too busy to deal with it but you got upset with the idea of them having any sort of darkness at all, why are you telling lies about that conversation.

[TheFinalPotato]

...
My complaints in the OP post are still in full force. It's far past 'mood lighting', it's actually detrimental to gameplay itself. Dark pipes, for example in the space cooling loop on metastation, blend into the atmosphere completely. Meson has hardly any effect - if a revealed tile is not DIRECTLY illuminated in light, it is hardly even a single step above pitch-black. Some stations, like Delta, have swathes of the station that are completely and utterly pitch black. Races that are meant to have night vision, like spiders for example, straight-up do not. They are borderline unplayable in the zones they are meant to have an advantage in.

The darkness is also straining to the eyes in a way that the normal lighting in this game simply is not. It's driven me, and several others, to not want to play on our servers not even because of the inconveniences it causes - but because it's actually physically painful after a time.

There are quite literally zero upsides to having the lighting like this. It adds nothing to the mood, makes certain things quite literally unplayable, makes most other things a pain, hurts many peoples' eyes, and is generally just a damper on what is otherwise a lot of peoples' favorite times on the server.

To be clear it's not a lighting thing, I mean it sort of is but it's a color matrix applied to literally the whole game plane. The idea is to approximate a sort of off color faded horror movie look, since some dude on github told me he thought it'd be cool. This is done by desaturating things somewhat, leaving more red and blue then green, then dropping off the bottom like 7% of color to nothing. The idea of this is to create harsh lines to make things looks sorta grimy and exposed. The trouble we have is some places really only have that 10%, so it works out a lot worse. This is particularly bad with some levels of nightvision, which will drop and then raise lighting to set a floor for how dark things can be, if that floor is below our 7% cutoff we just get pure black, which is cringe.

I don't really think pipes are a massive issue. They're visible against parallax most of the time, and it has hopefully gotten better since you posted this.
The pr I have up changes things slightly by setting a cap on how bright things can get, and then doing a slight drop down by like 3/4%. This hopefully means things stay washed out and we still get lines, but it's not as aggressive on people's sight. It should also help with the lavaland issue, though I may need to add special interaction with nightvision to make it work more effectively (basically reducing the dropoff to give it room to breath)

Delta seems fine with those changes, so idk.

I am not rushing to revert it because I think the idea has merit (of course I do it's my fault) but you're right it does need some fuckin with. It is also like, at most a week (used to be shorter blame headmins), so I don't worry too much about the ramifications of that decision.

and the fact that lots of people experiencing their first /tg/ Halloween think that the darkness is part & parcel of it, and feel like complaining is hopeless, erroneously believing they're 'going against tradition' or some shit.

Fucking lmao the wheel turns

[RedBaronFlyer]

I'm just not playing till it's over (or at least as much) because I was in a perfectly lit room and I still couldn't see jack shit. I've been able to see better playing the nighttime campaigns on L4D2 while being absolutely hammered compared to a round where I had three flashlights on my person with all of them on with this filter enabled.

[Googles_Hands]

Yeah, I haven't played since this got merged. Criticism is deflected with the justification "It's just for a week" and I'd be willing to bet that this will be forgotten, not fixed or adjusted and just happen again next year.
A bad addition to the Halloween event.