[shwiing]

so im on a mission to get my freespace to look as good as possible, so what are your settings for ambiant ans ub divide levels. mine are as follows
-ambient_factor 100 -max_subdivide 3.5
please post a screenshot of ingame for a reference of what it looks like i will post one of mine asap

[taylor]

-max_subdivide doesn't do anything so don't bother with that one.

-ambient_factor levels of 75 to 85 (depending on your monitor settings) generally look the best.  Personally, I prefer 78 with my LCD on DVI input, and 84 when using the VGA input.

Quality also depends on what build you are using and whether you are using D3D or OpenGL.

[CP5670]

I use an ambient factor of 90 and it looks pretty good to me. Anything under 100 generally looks far better than the default, whatever it is.

[Col. Fishguts]

I thought 100 was the default ?

Anything between 75 and 90 can look good, depending on your tastes.

[Herra Tohtori]

I'm using -ambient_factor as low as 65. I feel it gives more of a realistic graphics when the shadows actually are dark.

Of course it depends of the monitor settings too.

[shwiing]

hmm, lol ill try that..
ok, so lowering the ambiant factor makes it look better??, what does lowering or increasing it do?

[Herra Tohtori]

It affects the amount of ambient (background) light that has no direction like the light from a star has.

Ambient light comes from every direction, and on default settings it is much too high for a real space. It causes the shadowed (or actually, non-illuminated side as FSO doesn't support shadows) side of objects to "shine out", whereas in the real space it would be almost or completely dark.

So, the default setting is quite high, and lowering it makes the game a bit darker in overall appearance, makes shadows sharper and other nice stuff like that. As I said, I like it when I almost can't even see the dark sides of the ships. -ambient_factor 65 is good for this, I've found. Most seem to keep it a little brighter in, say, 75 or so.

[FireCrack]

I use an ambient factor of 30, game looks great.

[Herra Tohtori]

Might need to try that.

[Shadow0000]

Ambient light comes from every direction, and on default settings it is much too high for a real space

I agree with you in that Herra Tohtori.

I also start using low ambient_factor values, I mean, the only reason why I don't use it, is because I and I believe , other people too, has get used to it since it was very britght in FS2 retail.

I use an ambient factor of 30, game looks great.

I'll start to use this, planets benefit a lot from this.....

[DaBrain]

I'm using ambient_factor 00...  Could be even darker imho. 

[taylor]

I'm using ambient_factor 00...  Could be even darker imho. 

It has emissive light (in OGL at least) which keeps it from being totally dark.  Ambient light is light generated from the sun(s) (per game usage anyway) and emissive light is an overall sort of glow from objects.  -ambient_factor affects the ambient light level, but things can easily go totally black for surfaces not facing a sun.  The emissive light levels are kept very low to prevent this from happening, but it means that a scene can't truely be totally black.

I had added a registry option to disable emissive light when I was redoing the OpenGL light code, but removed that before the new code hit CVS.  I could possibly be convinced to make it a cmdline option until the new launcher is ready (it would be an ini file option at that point) if enough people want it.

[DaBrain]

*convinces taylor*


Would be really nice to have. If the new launcher won't come out this month a command line option would be great!

[taylor]

Would be really nice to have. If the new launcher won't come out this month a command line option would be great!

I'm not sure when I'll get to the new launcher.  The power supply in my Linux workstation died last week so I haven't been able to work on much of anything.  A replacement is on the way (damn specialty crap) but with all of my code on a machine that can't boot up, I haven't had much to do.

I've still got my Mac to fall back on though and I can easily use it to add the cmdline option since it would only take about 5 minutes to do.  I'll see if I can add it to CVS later today.


EDIT:  Ok, it's in.  The option is -no_emissive_light, and it won't be listed in the current launcher so don't bother looking for it.  I thought about doing an -emission_factor type thing instead but decided against that for now.  Maybe I'll do that at a later date if enough people care.

[DaBrain]

Great! I'll test it and tell you how it works as soon as the next CVS build comes out.