Just meant “strange” as in unfamiliar. I couldn’t speak to the realism before but I do appreciate the effort to have it move across the sky the way the actual sun does.
Yeah quite a lot of factors at play. Thanks for the response and the willingness to keep hammering it out. I’m confident you can mix the perfect cocktail of lighting and graphics fidelity.
Edit: Maybe instead of dialing back from the current look, try redoing from 1.0.0.6 design and working forward, adding one change at a time?
*yawn
Anyway, nice write-up medierra. Keep doing what you do… To me it means you still care about the game.
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It’s not that bad… holy shit! You must be the worst whiner I ever seem so far in these boards!
Just hit fullscreen and set your Gamma to the lowest, then you can live in the shadow forever, just like you live in your house’s basement.
People like you tick me off!
I’ve already explained in previous posts that this has nothing to do with brightness. Several times. Lowering gamma does nothing to the loss of detail. It just makes the loss of detail darker. And maybe I am complaining too much.
Sorry if I offended anyone and I will shut up now.
Hey, you’re trying to make it look good, responding to feedback, and trying fixes based on that feedback. That’s really all we can ask and you should be praised for doing that.
There is nothing wrong with speaking your opinion, but at least try to be patient while they try to improve it. It’s not like they’re doing it to make the game worse…
Thank you medierra. Your input is very appreciated.
so reintroduce the shader bug which threw all the lighting off after it was fixed ? 
There is only one way here, forward. Adjusting the other values now so that the lighting changes from fixing the bug get dialed back
Err… start after that change. :rolleyes:
I dunno, it’s just another way to approach a problem. Jump back to the last point where there was no trouble and work forward from there. The desired result might be more clear and crystallized this time around.
Being in the “it looked fine before” camp, I’m still trying to keep an open mind here that the visuals really needed an overhaul.
Thanks for that medierra. I have to say I completely disagree with you about that before picture. I love the look. I see nothing wrong with it all. To me it looks alive, realistic. Especially the water. It was that look that drew me to the game and is one of the reasons I have been playing this long.
I’m not going to stop playing because you had it changed, but I think it was a mistake to change it. I’m kinda disappointed.
Medierra, thanks a lot for the effort, and for responding to the community, it means a lot.
That being said, I also think that the before look was much better, and that I think that any solution that is closer to the before look is better than the solution closer to the after look.
But, please, whatever you do, keep the 1.0.0.6 camera. It had the perfect angle, better than in any other ARPG I played.
Again, thanks for communicating with us, I really appreciate it.
I’m not that serious of a gamer, but Grim Dawn really took me over. I went to bed the other day thinking about builds I wanted to make, and speculating about the features of the expansion.
And then the changes to brightness and camera came.
I don’t identify much with the gamer community, and I think that people often complain about stuff they really shouldn’t complain, but I just had to make an account to send a message to the game developers.
Please, do not make this drastical changes after the game established its visual identity. The brightness was perfect, the camera was excellent. Please give us the possibility to have the old brightness and the old camera back. I appreciate the fact that some people might like it the new way, but please allow us who had got used to the game in the way it was, to have it like that again.
In any case, thank you for making this beautiful game.
Just wanted to add some feedback, although this may have already been said (I haven’t read this entire thread).
Standing in Devil’s Crossing, it’s currently so bright that you’d have to assume it’s a sunny day with clear skies, yet there are periodic lightning flashes, which is a little disjointing. Further, the folks at Devil’s Crossing have their lanterns/candles lit, and several fires going, in the middle of what otherwise seems to be a bright, sunny day. In addition to making the game look worse (in my humble opinion), the changes that were made don’t really fit the environment.
The camera angle in this game was the best in the ARPG genre (to me) - so much so that playing other ARPGs with different angles/zoom felt awful after playing Grim Dawn. The camera in POE and D3 is almost game-breakingly bad for me after playing a lot of Grim Dawn, and I use a mod to make the Torchlight 2 camera closer to Grim Dawn’s.
Wishing I had my old game back.
but that change is what affects the lighting the most, as I tried to explain…
Right. And having made that necessary change, maybe there are other solutions to reconcile the visuals of the game with that change than the ones that were made in 1.0.0.7. I didn’t see where he wrote the shader change necessitated moving the sun or increasing overall brightness. These were incidental, luckily, which means they’re up for revision.
The point being that redoing might be preferable to undoing in this case, as you wouldn’t be encumbered by all the recent changes. It’s an abstract suggestion anyway. The approach won’t matter if the results look good.
Nobody should be questioning Crate’s excellent customer relations or the good intentions of the devs and other staff. I don’t think anybody here is being too too impatient.
Thanks for that medierra. I have to say I completely disagree with you about that before picture. I love the look. I see nothing wrong with it all. To me it looks alive, realistic. Especially the water. It was that look that drew me to the game and is one of the reasons I have been playing this long.
I’m not going to stop playing because you had it changed, but I think it was a mistake to change it. I’m kinda disappointed.
This is my point as well. I see/saw nothing really wrong with the old look. That was THE Grim Dawn look. All the people who bought the game did so with that look in mind. Now the colors are washed out, low contrast, the water looks like a 2005 game.
Definitely looking forward to seeing how it’s tweaked in the future, but damn. Huge step back in aesthetics for me. There’s a difference between changing how a certain look is executed and completely changing the look you’re going for. This update seems less of a refinement of the original GD look as a completely new approach to how the game’s aesthetics are rendered.
moving of the sun, no, but that makes sense based on med’s explanation, overall brightness is very much due to the bugfix though from my understanding
The shader change just required adjustment of ground texture specular values. Having those be too high would result in overly bright spots on the ground, as seen in the Warden’s Lab screenshot someone posted, where the player light and pfx are turning the tiles almost white.
There are multiple things at play here, with each one causing different issues or combining to contribute to them.
I think I’ve got things tuned back to a reasonable level. I changed the sun angle to 120 degrees. Originally it was 180, resulting in light always coming from behind everything at default camera angle, so things were always in shadow and you lost detail on chars and objects. In the current build, the light is shining on things from nearly the same angle as the camera faces, which causes shadows to be cast away from the camera, so you don’t see them as much. At 120 degrees, I think it’s a reasonable compromise where light is still hitting the surface of chars and objects facing the camera but it’s coming in at an angle that casts shadows perpendicular to the camera, making them more visible.
I reduced the pitch of the sun a bit, so it’s striking the terrain at a little more of an oblique angle, giving the ground normals a little more definition and resulting in overall less brightness. I reduced the brightness / contrast and bloom a bit.
I also touched up some ground textures that I think lost some of their relief when they were reworked and should appear more detailed now.
Hopefully the changes will make people happier. I think it looks better now than either 1.0.0.6 or 1.0.0.7 but we’ll see… I’m sure some people will still prefer it darker and others might now want it brighter but hopefully it will be in a place that everyone can live with.
With the imminent holidays here and some people already traveling to be with family, I’m not sure how soon we’ll be able to roll this out but it will be in the next hotfix, whenever that happens.
what would happen if you just made the ground texture darker(equally, just editing the texture image itself) it should work, no?
Really appreciate the effort you are putting (things like that made me purchase 2x the Loyaltist DLC you just put out).
However would it be technically impossible to have pre 1.0.0.7 lightning/camera/zoom and Post 1.0.0.7 to choose from in the Video Options Menu?
I know you are trying hard and looking forward to the latest build, but having Both options will solve everyone`s problem.
Happy Holidays!