Camera Effects

[André]

One thing I think can add a lot to the realism feel of the game is some more camera effects.

Currently the FOV does not factor in lens distortion (fish eye), which is more noticeable at higher FOV values. Here's an example below with the Liftoff image to the left, and a mockup of what lens distortion would look like to the right. :notice the trees near the sides of the screen get bent visually :)

https://ibb.co/jSGWEa

Another thing I think is important is the analog interference, in real life it's much more intense than in game - for example during signal loss (like flying behind objects) the picture may randomly switch to black and white, warp, shear, flicker upwards, etc. It would be great to be able to replicate this to enable a "purist" FPV experience.

Maybe even cause the picture to flicker when a new player joins a room - and "plugs in" his quad!

Among other visual effects could be
-total signal loss (black screen with snow) after some hard crashes
-lens cracks/dirt after crashing.
-lens flare (very related to dirt/cracks)

One thing that I do feel removes realism is the low dynamic range in game. When flying IRL, shadows (like inside houses) are much darker - almost black. When you fly in, windows bloom into white until you fly out again. So it would require adding an "eye adaptation effect".

Anyway these are just some ideas that I thought should be put out here :)

Thoughts?

[LuGus Studios]

Thanks for sharing these ideas, the team has looked at them and feels you made some really good points. Wa agree that these effects would increase the realism of the experience and as a result it's worth looking at further improving the camera effects in the game in future updates.

[LuGus Studios]

Happy to say, we have been experimenting with some new/improved camera effects. We are going to add some adjustable Fish-eye effects in one of the next updates. We are excited to see how this impacts the feeling of flight.

[André]

I tried fish eye effect today for about 30 minutes - it's awesome! Would it be possible to remove the black corners that come with the effect? Or is this a system limitation? I feel like I lose a little bit of peripheral vision that is useful (even in real life flying) to percieve positioning.

Also, the arrows to change FOV are awesome! maybe even use up/down keys to change angle? :D

[Kasper]

Originally posted by aesoft2009:

I tried fish eye effect today for about 30 minutes - it's awesome! Would it be possible to remove the black corners that come with the effect? Or is this a system limitation? I feel like I lose a little bit of peripheral vision that is useful (even in real life flying) to percieve positioning.

Also, the arrows to change FOV are awesome! maybe even use up/down keys to change angle? :D

While we'll continue to try and work around it, the black bands are indeed a bit of a technical limitation. The way a digital fisheye works is that it takes a square image and then distorts it in a way that mimics the lens effect. This means that we can't just fill in the corners, because the black bands were "outside" of the screen at the moment the image was first drawn: the data just isn't there.

Our original prototypes circumvented this by blowing up the image from the middle outwards, to the point where the black bands were again outside of the screen, at the cost of also cutting off actual image. It was visually slightly nicer, but it meant we lost even more of the peripheral vision you mentioned. Also, we were starting to run into resolution issues: you can only blow up an image so much before you start seeing pixels.

That said, we're still considering some image magic to overcome the issue. That's why we released this version as a user test to see what people thought of it and what direction to take next.

[vldkoz]

Would it be possible for the developers to publish an API of the camera effects (adding additional distortions to the video) so that other development teams could add their own effects? For example, could someone develop a plausible way for HDZero or some other system to play video? This would free up the development team and add more options for a more realistic image. Thank you.