Revamp the Bloom graphics effect

Originally Posted by Zwillinger GG, I would tell you that "I am killing you with my mind", but I couldn't find an emoticon to properly express my sentiment.

Originally Posted by Captain_Photon NOTE: The Incarnate System is basically farming for IOs on a larger scale, and with more obtrusive lore.

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Fix't that for ya, Bill.
Seriously. 'Depth of Field' effect is an abomination. I was so glad I found the 'off' button.
The 'distance fog' is bad enough, given how short that distance actually is, and how unrealistic it is.

Originally Posted by Zwillinger GG, I would tell you that "I am killing you with my mind", but I couldn't find an emoticon to properly express my sentiment.

Originally Posted by Captain_Photon NOTE: The Incarnate System is basically farming for IOs on a larger scale, and with more obtrusive lore.

since Depth of Field is not supported on either the Nvidia-glx or Fglrx drivers, it took me a moment to realize what you were talking about. However, there is actually a separate section for Bloom, and Bloom amount, in the advanced settings, as well as desaturation effects.

Far as I'm concerned, both of those things abominations of such magnitude that Doc Vahz would turn green with envy. Or possibly toxic reflux.

Depth of Field is not an inherently bad ideas, and games that actually support it as intended look very good. Depth of Field attempts to mimic the way our eyes focus on specific objects at a certain distance while leaving other objects blurred, which our eyes usually don't see since the area we see with any detail is about the size of a silver dollar held at an arm's length. City of Heroes, instead, turns us all near-sighted as anything that's a certain distance away from the camera grows blurry equally. Not only does this disallow us to actually FOCUS on what we're looking at, but it turns the world into an infinite dream sequence.

But Depth of Field is at least artistic. All Bloom does is make things dark and kill my contrast. The idea behind Bloom is to make environments brighter or darker in a realistic way. Thus, standing in a dark room should make everything brighter as your eyes adjust while simultaneously making the rest of the daylight world outside the small window meld into a mess of white as your eyes can't see it very well. At the same time, leaving the dark room and coming out into daylight should make the world much darker so that you can see the details of the outside world, but looking back into the room should show you a pitch black darkness because your eyes have adjusted to high light levels.

Now, 3D graphics can't show this because they tend to have a set exposure level, meaning darkness needs to be just light enough to see and "lightness" must be just dark enough to not blend into pasty whiteness like you're playing Mirror's Edge. Bloom is supposed to increase the range of lighting the game supports by dynamically altering your exposure level, adjusting your eyes, so to speak. Only Bloom makes dark things darker and bright things brighter, having exactly the OPPOSITE effect. In City of Heroes, this just ends up making things dark and killing your contrast pretty much everywhere you go. Night time kills your gamma, indoor environments kill your gamma, shadows kill your gamma. Basically, as far as I can tell, anything that isn't a bright sunny day makes things darker, and a bright day is just about as bright as normal. This is NOT cool.

I certainly hope Ultra Mode either fixes or axes these settings, because they do not look good.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.