Colors

[Les]

While I was never a fan of what I thought were the overblown sunsets/sunrises, preferring the more subdued ones we have now, I have to agree too that the game once had a much more accurate colour balance. When I was editing Cliffs Of Dover video's I could adjust the colours and add effects just like I would with a properly white-balanced photograph as a base image. I can clearly remember commenting how realistic/neutral the lighting was in general and how I hoped they wouldn't mess it up (by giving it a style or effect-like 'look', sort of like what we have now, even if for different reasons).

I don't think the lighting was ever perfect though, as even when I thought the colours were best looking, it was still a bit too dark overall. Still, just having to brighten the thing up a bit is a long way from where it's at now.

There may be hope though. In one of the other threads where this was discussed someone posted a link to some screenshots Oleg did during the early development of the game. I can't find those shots now, but amongst them were some images showing a whole bunch of GUI sliders that were controlling the lighting. I don't know how it all works, but if that interface survived the graphics engine rewrite, then maybe it will be released with the SDK.

In the meantime, as has been said, let's just hope the texture artists aren't currently adjusting their BOM texture colours under a skewed lighting setup (and who knows if they are or not), as no amount of global/overall lighting changes will fix that.