So I’ve been playing quite a bit recently and have noticed that around night time it doesn’t really get that dark and seems like there’s a constant full moon. The reason this is slightly an issue is it makes lights quite useless. The glow is very appealing but the moonlight pretty much already lights everything up, which brings me to my topic point.
Darkness / Night Slider
I guess you could call it a “Darkness Slider”? Or something? Basically giving the option to make the nights darker or brighter depending on the user preference.
UI Slider
I’d really like a UI Size slider. I think I’m playing in 1920 x 1080, it kinda feels like 1280 x 720. The UI starts getting in the way of more complex builds. Also, as a side suggestion, please make the “Drag to build” notification at the top of the screen go away at some point during construction. The UI Slider might fix this alone but at the moment it gets in the way quite a bit >_<
Part of the issue right now is that the glow effects seem to be incredibly expensive computing-wise on the game–I’ve had the slider down to zero pretty much since Alpha 9 or 10 in order to make the massive builds I want to. Once the lighting system gets streamlined more, I hope light sources and darkness can play a larger part in the game world.
I’ve noticed a similar issue on both fronts. I would be really nice if we could get a very toned down UI for construction (especially not losing such a huge amount of the screen to the build UI), including stuff like preventing pop-ups during construction, except for high priority stuff (hearthlings low on health!)
At the same time I’m using a (reasonably) powerful card for 1920x1080 gaming (R9 270), and having the light slider turned up past 25 with any kind of shadow detail just absolutely nukes my framerates. I’m talking losing 100+ FPS just from adding ~25 lights with shadow effects. It’s at the point where I play with the maximum number of lights, but no shadows (and still maintain 60 FPS, locked, with 45 hearthlings).
I’m on a Nvidia Geforce GTX680 with 4GB of dedicated video ram, I have max lights set to 50, shadow detail on a lot and draw distance set to 500 (since you never really need to see that far off into the distance anyways) and I’m usually getting a constant 60 FPS. Though, at the same time, I only have about 13 - 14 lights.
So performance hasn’t really been that big of an issue for me. I’m also playing on the develop build 2924 so maybe they’ve made some performance boosts there?
Cap out 250 lights and get back to me, it gets pretty brutal
I’m also playing on the newest dev build, but insofar as I’m aware we’re a couple rounds past performance fixes. Either way, I doubt we’ll see an overhaul of the lighting system for a while, in the interest of getting more engaging features into the game.
After all (and I mean this without any cynicism) it’s shiny features that get alpha copies sold, optimization, as valuable as it is, isn’t sexy. … at least not to most people! xD
