Lack of hdr eye adaptation makes dark areas pitch black and unplayable!

[v00d00m4n]

How about fixing this issue?

[Holiday]

That's why there are flares.

[v00d00m4n]

This looks unrealistic as hell, they should add some eye adaption, dark areas should not be pitch black ,especially when you gun emitts light.

[nuffe]

There is eye adaptation, it's just not as extreme as most other games.

If you shoot a lot of flares in one spot, you'll notice.

[Bulkybear]

It's 100% realistic. No light = no vision even in real life.

[v00d00m4n]

Have you ever walked at night or got into some dark are? There is almost impossible to find place where you can see nothing, and in quake 2 there are no areas where at least some lights are not present.

There are no ABSOLUTELY NO LIGHT areas! Also its a ray tracing, light should bounce into dark areas and lit them as well. For example in very 1st leve, when you go outdoor to area wtih water and flags on building, there is a stair and you have secret area under this stair - its unrealistically pitch black and does not count the fact that nearby walls and floor is well lit and this lighting should bounce and lit under stair area, also it does not count the fact that once you under it, eyes should adapt to darkness and see details under it. Its absolutely unrealistic.
Same with other areas that has some amount of lights... well supposed lights which nvidia seems to forgot to count as light sources. And oh boy, if you set night, you will see darkest and absolutely unplayable night ever in game.

It seems like shadows and lights overpowered and has artificially buffed contrast or something like this, because in lit areas lights are too strong as well and everything is overlit.

[MASTAN]

First secret level, area with supershotgun. Underwater secret there has absolutely no light.

Under stairs secret in the first level is not pitch black anymore. Set sun to noon, and silencer will be clearly visible in Q2RTX(unlike original). It's pitch black only in night time. Light bounces properly in RTX(set Global Illumination to high for higher lighting there).

There is eye adaptaion. Same secret on first level, sun set to noon. Crawl under there and look at the sunlit area. Then quickly turn away(face silencer) and immediately make screenshot. Make another screenshot in 3-5 seconds. Compare them and you'll see that adaptaion works.

In many games adaptation is overrated. In real life going from sunlit area to almost pitch-black would take minutes to fully adapt, maybe 10-15. Most games make it almost instant.

[ReKTeK 🌟]

If you want to alter the adaptation/exposure, play around with these commands. Be warned that you can make it look worse if you don't finely tune the values.

tm_min_luminance (default: 0.002) <-- lower for more light
tm_exposure_bias (default: -1.0) <-- increase for more exposure
tm_dyn_range_stops (default: 7.0) <-- increase for more light steps

The gun light is only partially correct. There are two models for each weapon, one is a first person model which only you see, and the other is the third person model which other players see. They only made models + textures for first person models. Weapons would only light up the map if there was third person models which had a diffuse + _light textures. I tested this myself by forcing the engine to render the first person gun (with hand attached lol) in third person and it lit up the map, but only _barely_ and in very dark areas. With some alterations I could make it brighter. Keeping in mind that this doesn't replace properly designed third person weapons.

[v00d00m4n]

Originally posted by MASTAN:

First secret level, area with supershotgun. Underwater secret there has absolutely no light.

Under stairs secret in the first level is not pitch black anymore. Set sun to noon, and silencer will be clearly visible in Q2RTX(unlike original). It's pitch black only in night time. Light bounces properly in RTX(set Global Illumination to high for higher lighting there).

There is eye adaptaion. Same secret on first level, sun set to noon. Crawl under there and look at the sunlit area. Then quickly turn away(face silencer) and immediately make screenshot. Make another screenshot in 3-5 seconds. Compare them and you'll see that adaptaion works.

In many games adaptation is overrated. In real life going from sunlit area to almost pitch-black would take minutes to fully adapt, maybe 10-15. Most games make it almost instant.

you are probably not playing on well calibrated display or tv with color range 16-235, try that and you will get always pitch black.

[MASTAN]

Originally posted by Voodooman:

Originally posted by MASTAN:

First secret level, area with supershotgun. Underwater secret there has absolutely no light.

Under stairs secret in the first level is not pitch black anymore. Set sun to noon, and silencer will be clearly visible in Q2RTX(unlike original). It's pitch black only in night time. Light bounces properly in RTX(set Global Illumination to high for higher lighting there).

There is eye adaptaion. Same secret on first level, sun set to noon. Crawl under there and look at the sunlit area. Then quickly turn away(face silencer) and immediately make screenshot. Make another screenshot in 3-5 seconds. Compare them and you'll see that adaptaion works.

In many games adaptation is overrated. In real life going from sunlit area to almost pitch-black would take minutes to fully adapt, maybe 10-15. Most games make it almost instant.

you are probably not playing on well calibrated display or tv with color range 16-235, try that and you will get always pitch black.

Huh? My display is fine.
And always pitch black where?
Here're screenshots of before and after adaptation of that secret on the first map. Check youself if you don't believe me.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1768701385
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1768701413

[ReKTeK 🌟]

^ I can confirm MASTAN's results

[v00d00m4n]

Originally posted by MASTAN:

Originally posted by Voodooman:

you are probably not playing on well calibrated display or tv with color range 16-235, try that and you will get always pitch black.

Huh? My display is fine.
And always pitch black where?
Here're screenshots of before and after adaptation of that secret on the first map. Check youself if you don't believe me.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1768701385
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1768701413

Weirdly, i had different results. What settings do you use? I think it might be tied to problem or my game is bugged. ALso, do you play on RTX or any other card??? They probably use simplified renderer for non RTX cards.

[v00d00m4n]

Ok i just checked my suspicions and yes - its a bug or a badly implemented feature - this eye adaptation is tied to global illumination option, it works fins at high, does not work at off and low and barey works at medium. I played on low, this is why dark places was pitch black for me, once it turned GI to high i managed to actually see things in darkness.

Still needs some fixing by patches.

[MASTAN]

I play using RTX 2070. Settings are standard, except GI is high and resolution scaling 80% @2560x1440. And additionally sv_adjustfov 1 for proper widescreen support.

[pidge2k]

Hello all,
Thank you for your feedback. This does not appear to be a bug. Setting Global Illumination = High means two bounces which can make an area go from appearing pitch black to non-black.

Regards,
Manuel
NVIDIA Customer Care

[v00d00m4n]

Well, bug or not, this is all does not look right and well implemented feature. Colors in this port are screwed up and does not look physicially correct and most important - they screw up gameplay. Also eye apaptation should be purely tone map based feature independand from ray tracing, and should turn any pitch black area into well lit if tonemap shader fed with proper hdr image which is got compressed into sdr by tonemap.

With some tweaks like one mentiione above, pluse some other cvars i discored with old good cvarslist its possible to fix places like under the stairs, to actually be able to see something at darknes,, but this screwing up lit areas, making them even more lit. Also whole tone mapping even according to debun histogram is done very wrong, and color range just very far from perfect, undersaturated, overexposed in lit areas, underexposed in shadows and so on.

And no matter what tweaks i try, when its night time, its so pitch black, i cant see anything, and eye adaptation does not help, because it seems there are not enough rays of lights to bounce, or their intensity is way too little and distance too short. Just again, set night time and get to the 1st outdoor area in main corridor, get to the place with water, flags and entrance into tunnel - you will not be even able to navigate through this darknes. Its totally seems wrong and need fixing.

Another thing that needs fixing is the stroggos env map, it does not closely resembles original quake 2 atmosphere and lighting, original actually looks nicer and gives reddish lights like original game, but way too low res and lacking sun (which is weird by the way), but even with it, nigh time seems wrong.

Right now, with all the major screw up of color balance this ray tracing demo does not really look impressive and comfortable to play with, rasterized games even when they imitate real lighting not 100% correct, still looks more correct and pleasant, than this attempt of fully ray traced game.