Or like looking through a windscreen I've never gotten comfortable with LFS not having them, and that the view from inside the car is totally crystal clear.
@Electrik Kar This picture is teh sex!!1!
no, seriously, it looks really nice, don't have the words to tell how much i like that picture :O We need to gather money to build a real life BL track so we can enjoy such a sunset live
Last night I was experimenting toggling between having bloom on or bloom off (normal) and when I did that I thought that neither option was appropriate or realistic. Enabling that bloom means that the picture contrast really washes out and it looks as Hyper described as 'worn out and dirty'. But I concluded that normal settings (with no bloom), also looks very artificial- unnaturally harsh and vivid, ugly, wrong. If you drive around with one setting for a while, you can get used to it, but over time I prefered the bloom setting, as it has a softer quality about it (SR's .ini) that does tend to look a bit more 'natural', to me anyhow.
There aren't any games around which look real, and we shouldn't expect there to be. At the end of the day you've just gotta give the technology you're using some concessions, as it's all about tricks. Bloom is a low cost special effect which doesn't look real, but it can be better than not having it.
Yea, I found that to be true. Even if you soften the bloom to relatively nothing, the lighting itself does appear more realistic. There is a way to turn the contrast up a smidge through the .ini, and that does help a bit for the 'dirty' look. The trick of it is to get the bloom to stick to the light source (in the sky ofcourse) imo that is more realistic than the swiming through a dirty pond type of bloom. There are settings within the .ini that allow this, though one thing affects another and it becomes tricky. I can see the potential in this, it's just got to be implemented correctly and without making you want to squirt Visine in your eyes.
I've got the .ini here that I've been working on. I tried setting the bloom so that it activates mostly when you are shaded by the light source (sun) from buildings, trees and tunnels. Sunset's seem to overact a bit.
Make sure you change cameras or hit shift+backspace twice. It starts blurred and needs a little kick in the rear to activate the settings for some reason.
My thoughts exactly! I was going to write some thoughts after playing yesterday, but now I have nothing to add.
Even though it's still pretty stupid looking in some conditions, it's also better than without it in some. Pretty even in overall I think.
There you go, those were the words I was looking for .
To add to that, I think the bloom also gives some objects character. Ex) Some metals actually look kinda like metal when the light reflects off of it (fernbay bridge).
You can basically achieve as much with an s-curve colour profile - make one in your nvidia (or ati) control panel, save it and set it to activate with LFS. Tada - no need for extra software.