Release 225: Farming!

[james]

Update OP with details of 225.2.

Main changes are - exposing a dark balance, improving the bloom, and fixing the portal crashes.

@james

Release 225.2:

Engine:

• Exposed a Darkness setting allowing players to define their own darkness level.
  • This isn’t a gamma control, which would have brightened the entire screen. But rather a control over the darkness that the game will increase exposure for. Basically making things at night easier to see.
  • If you test this when surrounded by very dark terrain it will have a limited effect. But if balanced with normal green grass and yellow sand then it should make things much more visible.
  • We’ve exposed this because different displays can present different levels of darkness - it’s not possible to have a single balance for all displays.
  • The option is found on PC via: [ESC] -> Main Menu -> Settings -> Graphics -> Display -> Dark Balance
• Improvements to HDR auto-exposure adjustment to better account for darker levels of lighting; will help in some cases that were too dark even though HDR was able to adjust for it, for example in the sanctum.
• Additional refinements to the mesh & voxel lighting consistency to make them much closer. The aim is to make the lighting for the same material mesh objects (for example stone storage) and voxels (for example stone) match.
• Adjusted the bloom algorithm and balance to only bloom bright things. Technically these thresholds shouldn’t be required, but without them the presentation can feel a little blurry. This change attempts to isolate the brighter areas and only bloom these.

Bug fixes:

• Fixed an issue with the synchronisation of attributes (mainly buffs) between the client and server that was causing a client crash.