TRUE darkness has never been tried! And maybe that's a good thing?

[rusty_shackleford]

Darkness isn't fun because you don't have the majority of other senses (other than sound) that would compensate for the loss of sight. You can't carefully feel your way around and you just end up ******* up, falling down, running into walls, etc. That's not fun at all.

I brought this up in the gamepad discussion thread and nobody cared, but this would be a good use of modern gamepads. Haptic feedback is really good now, and I have some budget chinktroller.
ghosts of tsushima used it for when you were near certain items, the controller would vibrate very slightly in the direction of the item, without the controller it has to use visual feedback which imo ruined what they were going for with it

[logincrash]

Darkness isn't fun because you don't have the majority of other senses (other than sound) that would compensate for the loss of sight. You can't carefully feel your way around and you just end up ******* up, falling down, running into walls, etc. That's not fun at all.

I brought this up in the gamepad discussion thread and nobody cared, but this would be a good use of modern gamepads. Haptic feedback is really good now, and I have some budget chinktroller.
ghosts of tsushima used it for when you were near certain items, the controller would vibrate very slightly in the direction of the item, without the controller it has to use visual feedback which imo ruined what they were going for with it

Yeah, I played some racing game on my brother-in-law's PS5 and the controller would vibrate when you went off-road, getting stronger and stronger the rougher the terrain got.

[Norfleet]

Couldn't that be fixed with a simple screenspace shader though? Something like ssao, but emitting a very faint glow instead.

I don't know what an ssao is, but yes, that'd be under "night vision mode". It wouldn't look the same, though. It'd be very weird and unnatural because that's, well, nothing like how it looks in reality. There really isn't an English word for that kind of blackred color, and monitors are, obviously, physically incapable of producing it. It'd just be a way of effectively compromising "darkness".

[Element]

Couldn't that be fixed with a simple screenspace shader though? Something like ssao, but emitting a very faint glow instead.

I don't know what an ssao is, but yes, that'd be under "night vision mode". It wouldn't look the same, though. It'd be very weird and unnatural because that's, well, nothing like how it looks in reality. There really isn't an English word for that kind of blackred color, and monitors are, obviously, physically incapable of producing it. It'd just be a way of effectively compromising "darkness".

Screenspace ambient occlusion.

It's an interesting problem to crack for a real artist (not of the artstation variety) - how to make an aesthetically appealing shader that will lend the eye enough information on the geometry of the terrain around you, and yet avoid the well trodden approaches of outlines or simply a dim light.

[Norfleet]

Screenspace ambient occlusion.

Yeah, that's just a mouthful of meaningless buzzwords. What's that mean in ENGLISH?

It's an interesting problem to crack for a real artist (not of the artstation variety) - how to make an aesthetically appealing shader that will lend the eye enough information on the geometry of the terrain around you, and yet avoid the well trodden approaches of outlines or simply a dim light.

To be fair, "outlines of dim light" is essentially how it works in the real world: You see the near-infrared shapes of things.

It looks sorta like this:


Only when seen by humans and not mapped to a camera, it's not really a black-and-white image, but rather, a blackred-on-black, so it's very dim and normally gets entirely drowned out by much brighter visible light. But when you're adapted to pitch blackness, you start to see it more clearly, and if you're accustomed to living in darkness, you're used to seeing the world this way.

Interesting fact: Many common clothing materials are transparent to NIR so people appear naked when seen in NIR-conditions. This would probably be much nicer if Eloi weren't so **** unattractive.

[logincrash]

Screenspace ambient occlusion.

Yeah, that's just a mouthful of meaningless buzzwords. What's that mean in ENGLISH?

Shadows within shadows.

ssao.jpg

[Norfleet]

Shadows within shadows.

GRAPHICS, SCHMAPHICS! FORSOOTH!

[A Chinese opium den]

Interesting fact: Many common clothing materials are transparent to NIR so people appear naked when seen in NIR-conditions. This would probably be much nicer if Eloi weren't so **** unattractive.

Aren't you married to the ogre from shrek?

[Norfleet]

Aren't you married to the ogre from shrek?

No, but I live in the US. Amerifats are terribly unattractive creatures. It is fortunate that Eloi are so terrified of the dark that I would never have to see them under these conditions.

[DDC]

The original Dragon Warrior has True Darkness. If you run out of torches in a dungeon you just have to bang around into walls and hope you get out before attrition from random battles kills you. Me and my best friend got lost that way in one of the midgame dungeons after killing the boss or getting the macguffin or whatever and it was a huge rush actually making it out. That was back in the day when JRPGs were brand new and we didn't have a clue what we were doing but had gotten the game free from Nintendo Power.

[Finarfin]

Everyone who installed a total darkness nighttime mod for a Bethesda game never seemed to enjoy it and ended up doing all sorts of autistic exploits and bizarre little rituals to circumvent it.

Unless the game has special mechanics for night or time sensitive quests just making half of the game time an unplayable mess that you will stand in a corner and use a wait feature to fast forward to day is a ******** waste of time.

I'd say if one uses a mod like that, download a useable lantern mod, that tends to be nice, along with skies that are not just black voids all the time.

[tehdude27]

There's a zone in everquest that has high level undead mobs spawn at night, during the day it's a bunch of low level mobs. It being memorable enough to come to me when I was thinking about this must be worth something. Which isn't technically darkness but related to night time, I suppose.

Otherwise, I suspect a handful of roguelikes that are escaping me at the moment probably do this well.

A number of RPGs will change enough of the world and the enemies you encounter at night. The Witcher is well known for this.