Just thinking here. I'm not a photographer by any means, but I do own three cameras. This reminds me of when something bright dominates the scene, and the camera adjusts down the exposure and brightness to try and retrieve some balance/detail from the clouds, causing the background (terrain) colours to darken a lot. That's what it seems like to me anyways

yes phillip all these "lens" factors need to be taken into consideration.

the only game that i know of that simulates a lens view of the world is gran tourismo 5. and it does a bloody good job. we can not replicate lens effects in il2cod yet. hint hint. (this is 1 aspect thats part of the future of graphics)

the dev team should change the trees to a more darker variety. yes. i hope they will.

i would love to be part of there beta testers or feedback team with an russian and english speaking person. but i dont know if they organise like that.

lol for now i got me some cosmic green i must get rid off.

Yes, the camera is stepped down a few stops to maintain the detail in the highlights of the clouds. Of course it also looks like its a slide film, which generally has a lower dynamic range than computer monitors.

GT5 isn't the only game that simulates a camera lens, if you're talking about photo mode. And even then its not a simulation of the lens, but mostly post processing effect (Note: I'm assuming the DOF blur is using the z buffer) And games like crysis 2, UDK, ect are doing tons of things to mimic/fake the look of film. Anamorphic lens flair, color grading, color fringing, ect.

dusk around late evening. its a pleasure to fly over that now.
http://i.imgur.com/AIsc9l.jpghttp://i.imgur.com/OTZ71l.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/ppWoNl.jpghttp://i.imgur.com/CEZrul.jpg

these shots look superb Ali Fish!

I think you have a pretty good eye for this job ;)

I'll stay tuned for an official update with the changes to the trees :D Just you watch!

Yes, regarding the picture I posted above, the colours are definitely far off from what the eye would see.
However, it demonstrates how, in a particular area, there are only really 2 main colours of fields, as opposed to the patchwork/multi-coloured design of CloD.
I think natural simplicity is key here.

The dark trees make a big differance.

Indeed.

A couple of days I did some thinking about the trees.

Yes, to me from a distance a forrest seems darker that what we have ingame. However, when I imagine a tree whose leaves do have the dark green that I imagine for a forest it just would not look right. I compared this recently to the trees I saw when taking my car over 500 km. And indeed the trees don't look dark at all when looking at them individually.

I then came to think that forest just seems to be so much darker than the surrounding meadows because of shadow. In fact the totality of leaves of a tree represent a much more fractal shape than meadows (that's the evolutionary benefit of leaves on a tree) and thus there's more fractal shadow on the inner layers of the tree crown. Hence why they appear darker from the distance while on close up they aren't.

agreed. ive commented about the differences in the mass of different colours at different distances. this is not implemented in cod (yet?) and the problem, 2 tree base models. 1 for close up and one or distant. distant colouring is based on close up model colouring and blended thus to make the transition relativly invisible. the close up version given presidence unfortunatly.

there is no shader that blends the distant with the close tree model textures. the lod of the hi quality version creeps in, in an awkward manner. the colour of the hi quality tree model when viewing up close had to be used on the distant model too. hence the problem. and why we have "cosmic green tree-itus". lol (im not suggesting we need a shader btw)

with my mod we now have hi quality tree model far to dark so it blends with the distant tree model. although its not that bad. as i will demonstrate in roughly 1 hours time with a video (uploading presently)

in the current format we have several tree variations, and soon i will dable in re colouring them whilst trying to keep the major tree groups as dark as possible. variation is what we want to see more than at present. but hang tight for the video. i know that now without controllable vehicles this is a flightsim. i think the trees should be based on the darker distant colours seen from height as thats where we are in a flightsim.