Nameless Voice on 24/10/2008 at 00:00

---

The one thing I hate about Oblivion's renderer is that it's too bright during the day; light-skinned peoples' faces becoming so white that they glow, etc. Urgh. (I must mess turn off Bloom the next time I play, come to think of it..)

I posted a couple of screenshots from both Thief and SS2 (http://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?p=1781149#post1781149) here yesterday. Yandros linked to two of those, but check out the others if you want to make your eyes water.

van HellSing on 24/10/2008 at 05:39

---

What do you mean? It captures the essence of Oblivion wonderfully.

It's not the screenshot that's awful, it's the game.

Volca on 24/10/2008 at 06:00

---

Well, the description you give makes it sound reasonable. The eye blinking I imagined was involuntary, repetitive. Brain is smart enough to block the vision once blinking occurs, so normally you don't even realise it happened. The same can not be said about a game implementation of it.

Also, I think thief would gain much more from parallax mapping, specular maps, reflective water and such (but this needs much more work than a simple bloom filter). All has to be optional though, because sometimes people just want the raw T1 experience with the graphics of that time.

Nameless Voice on 24/10/2008 at 10:07

---

Admittedly I have a bit of a cold, but when I tested this it was literally making my eyes water, which is not really something that I feel would make playing Thief more enjoyable.

Maybe with adjusted settings it might be better, but basically it just seems to be washing out or distorting the details in the image.

Twist on 24/10/2008 at 15:18

---

Nameless Voice: You have to adjust its settings. It's highly configurable. I messed around with the settings some more after I posted my screenshots and it is very easy to make it even more subtle or emphasize different aspects of its functionality (like improve contrast or make colors more vivid).

You can configure it to be so subtle its subliminal. :thumb: There are over 20 different settings to configure and almost every one of those settings makes a tangible difference to the way it looks and behaves.

Yes it looks like crap at its default settings. But it's silly to judge it at those settings considering the defaults are tweaked to work with an entirely different game and game engine.

Two settings which immediately clean it up are:

BloomAllowOversaturation

Set this to 0 and you immediately eliminate that gross over-saturated lens flare at light sources and on surfaces near light sources.

BloomCurveDay
BloomCurveNight

Increasing these values greatly reduces the fuzzy haziness of entire scenes.

I didn't understand these last two settings when I took those screenshots posted above. I think I can improve the Ashen Age shot by reducing the fuzziness but keeping the improved color and contrast.

I'm still not entirely convinced it's an unequivocal improvement. But I think people are writing it off too quickly and easily. There are many areas where it really does make Thief look much better. And that's coming from someone who stubbornly clings to Thief's classic look.

Two things you can't see in screenshots:

1. Dark areas have a more compelling, inky darkness to them. Overall this render trick appears to improve contrast and smooth the transition from dark areas to light areas. You can't really capture that with a screenshot because it will look too dark.
2. You can sort of see this in the screenshots, but it makes everything a little more vivid, particularly colors. After walking around for a bit with ENB enabled, turning it off makes it feel like you've pulled a dull gray haze over the screen.

My two biggest problems:

1. Maybe further tweaking the configuration will help this, but like Willie mentioned, right now it varies too widely from one area (or mission) to the next. Sometimes it looks fantastic, but then sometimes it just looks too hazy or lights look too flared.
2. I still have a nostalgic loyalty to the original look and feel. This isn't a logical complaint, but even when certain scenes look more dynamic and vivid, sometimes they just don't feel right to me. *shrug*

Again, maybe greater understanding and further experimenting with the configuration will appease my complaints.

But I think it isn't fair to directly associate how this works with the gross examples of bloom and HDR out there (like that Oblivion screenshot). It doesn't have to look like that if you configure it properly.