Are there any plans for glow (HDR, Bloom)?

[toph]

Well, as the topic says, do you have any plans for putting in light-features like HDR or Bloom into 0ad?

[Argalius]

IIRC certain team members strongly dislike anything that even looks like bloom.

[Ykkrosh]

That's probably just me - it seems like I've seen too many screenshots where the bloom seems unpleasantly overdone and makes everything look blurry, kind of like when you go outside on a very sunny day and have to cover your eyes to avoid the glare from the ground or buildings or passersby with white clothing, or like some bad dreams I used to have where I could get the impression of vision without being able to really see anything; and in the games it's like that effect permanently . (It also doesn't help that I can't see those effects in real-time on my own computer, so I'm unaware of what it really looks like (and am also possibly jealous of those who can ))

Ignoring my feelings: It seems that games which support HDR were designed around that from the beginning - as far as I'm aware (though I'm not a graphics programmer) it's fairly fundamental to how the game's graphics engine works, and can't just be stuck on later. (And our renderer wasn't designed for that kind of thing - it was originally aimed at the GeForce 3, and it would be too costly to completely redesign the renderer and all our art data to focus on more recent hardware features.)

I'd guess bloom is easier to add as a kind of hack, so that might be more possible. It's probably less worthwhile in an RTS game than in most other types of game, since the camera is almost always aimed downwards and not at the sky (which is where the blooming seems to be most commonly used) - but it could be a nice addition to the higher-end water shaders when they're reflecting the sun or bright sky. But I'm still not a graphics programmer (nor an artist), and I don't know how hard that would be or whether it's worth the effort, so, um, I don't have any useful answers

[Aeros]

That's probably just me - it seems like I've seen too many screenshots where the bloom seems unpleasantly overdone and makes everything look blurry

I agree, its horribly overdone in most games out there right now. If HDR is used correclty to mimick bright lights, you would not notice it unless you knew exactly what to look for. I don't believe there is much room for HDR in 0 A.D. (I'm speaking artistically), it would be more suitable for a game that has dramatic differences in lighting and contrast. Otherwise it would not be very noticable and we will feel bad for 50% of the processing time going to HDR and to compensate we'd want to turn it up alot so its very noticable....this is what ensemble did with AoE3 =P The swords practically look like lightsabers they are so shiny.

[Matei]

I think blur makes a lot more sense in first or third person games than in an RTS. In an RTS, you're looking at a large area at a time so you want the view to be as detailed as possible, and blur takes away from that. It's not just from an artistic point of view - to play the game, you need to be able to tell units apart, which becomes harder when they're blurry. Blur is great in an FPS or RPG when you look at a bright light, because the bright object covers a large part of the screen and you can still tell what kind of object it is.

[RiderOfEternity]

I think it would be more worthwhile to add screen effects (for use in scenarios?) rather than HDR, such as distance fog and blur, colour inverstions/distortions. However it would be good if you added in Bloom, as I like how there are some lighter spots and also how the actual light source glows onto the edges of scenery http://th7.org/wp-content/images/hl2lc/00.jpg

[Mythos_Ruler]

I'd rather use graphics processing power on more polygons and transparencies and water-shaders than HDR and bloom and all that jazz. I do like distance fog though.

[Titus Ultor]

That's how I feel, as well. It's also a lot of programming time and effort to put into a feature that only people with top-of-the-line computer can see. If it could be done easily and subtly, it'd be a great feature. But at the moment, I don't see it being cost-efficient.