I'm tired of bad auto exposure in games being defended as "eye adaption" or "happens in real life"

nkarafo

nkarafo

Member
This shit is not what your eyes see.

N0cFtrxv3MR060b4.jpg



Neither is this:

EvAUUya4JQZHfiGp.png



No, stop it. Don't even think about it. You can clearly see what's outside the tunnel in real life. And yes, you can see outside your door or window when it's a bright day outside. Try it now! Amazing, right?

Whenever i see discussions about this completely crappy effect in modern games, i see so many defending it as being realistic because "this is how our eyes work". Really? All you see outside your window is a bright white shine and nothing else? Well, i'm sorry but if that's how your eyes work you must have them checked immediately.

This isn't eye adaption, this is just bad auto exposure settings. This is how crappy cameras work, not our eyes. A lot of games turn this effect to 11 because if you can show it, why be subtle about it?

Just look at it, look how in the first picture the white car turned to silver because of the intense, out of boundaries exposure.

I fucking hate it.

/rant
 
I'm with the dog, you're mixing up real life eyes with cameras and cinematic licence OP

Eyes have more dynamic range than life, but even moden displays don't. Thats why they used to and continue to use this effect.

What display/TV do you have OP? Exact model numbers only please. I can help.
 
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Battlefield 6 was guilty of this but thankfully they've dialed it back a bit. It still exists though and is annoying. Can't stand it.

Somewhat related glitch but this is seriously what you would sometimes see when looking out some windows in BF6; Nearly burned out my damn retinas playing it last night:

image.png
 
Kuranghi said:
I'm with the dog, you're mixing up real life eyes with cameras and cinematic licence OP

Eyes have more dynamic range than life, but even moden displays don't. Thats why they used to and continue to use this effect.

What display/TV do you have OP? Exact model numbers only please. I can help.
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I know it's a camera defect. It's when they tell me it's also how human eyes work that grinds my gears.

Also no, older games didn't use that and they were fine without it. In fact, older games often look better because they don't have that.

I don't have a HDR display if that's what you are asking. And WRC Generations doesn't even have any HDR settings anyway, the game just looks broken like that no matter what.
 
nkarafo said:
Absolutely disgusting. This guy doesn't know what he is talking about.

Unless.... Am i the only one who doesn't have this eye defect?

Do i have super sight? Am i a super hero?
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this shit was peak technology back then, very obnoxious today when we have actual HDR
 
nkarafo said:
I know it's a camera defect. It's when they tell me it's also how human eyes work that grinds my gears.

Also no, older games didn't use that and they were fine without it. In fact, older games often look better because they don't have that.

I don't have a HDR display if that's what you are asking. And WRC Generations doesn't even have any HDR settings anyway, the game just looks broken like that no matter what.
Click to expand...

I agree its frustrating but games that dont do this have a flatter overall look when showing interiors and exteriors simultaneously, its a trade off.

It would be good if you could choose which you want but they won't spend the money to debug both modes unfortunately.
 
I think it can have a place if you're going for a more exaggerated feel. Like a drug addict appearing from a cave or someone in prison going outside or something. Its just a tool in a director's kit to use. I can agree it isn't really realistic.
 
kpopSuperstar said:
Sometimes when the sunlight hits your eyes when you walk outside, it can kinda be like that.
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Yes but this isn't what they try to emulate.

In games, when you look outside the window it always looks like a nuclear blast. It's not like it slowly clears up, it stays like that until you actually go outside. That's not how your eyes work otherwise we wouldn't have windows in our homes.

It's just the auto exposure setting, not "eye adaption".
 
Kuranghi said:
I agree its frustrating but games that dont do this have a flatter overall look when showing interiors and exteriors simultaneously, its a trade off.

It would be good if you could choose which you want but they won't spend the money to debug both modes unfortunately.
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I get it's the higher range that most cameras and monitors can't show. But it's not "eye adaption", it never was.

Also some games will do this even in HDR monitors because the effect is "baked". I assume WRC generations is like that since it doesn't have any HDR settings.
 
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I always assumed this was originally done to obfuscate streaming in the scene beyond the portal incrementally as the player approached it. I agree it looks shite, like a technical compromise.
 
This why I adore older games. None of the crappy cinematic stuff like this. The vignette effect is by far my least favorite. It makes my unconsciously strain my eyes.
 
Gripsx said:
didnt half life 2 source engine started this?
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HDR is the first setting to turn off in any source engine game lol.
in tons of source mods this would give you an insane competitive advantage over people who keep it on. like in Insurgency, there were idiots who had it on and could not see shit in some maps xD
 
I think what gets misunderstood is the fact that this is not simulating how our eyes work in real life, but simulating the fact that outdoor natural lighting is orders of magnitude brighter than interior lighting. Our eyes are so good at dynamically adjusting,that we mostly don't notice the difference.

This can't be represented accurately, even on the highest end displays money can buy. So it's a pick your poison situation. Either display an inaccurate representation of the difference in brightness levels, or display an exaggerated bloom effect that represents this order of magnitude difference in brightness.

Edit: coincidentally, I was listening to a long form discussion on this very topic this morning. They were discussing some of the challenges of delivering an immersive and realistic environment in VR in the face of the inherent limitations of display technologies. This very point was brought up.
 
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It's simulating differences in light, eyes just have much higher range of differences they can see at the same time than a camera; like sunlight is super bright, just intensely ridiculously bright really, and all other lights are much weaker, to show that difference in an engine/camera is really hard without just bringing the range much closer together.
That's why you get this effect where it's essentially just translated to how a camera sees it.
 
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nkarafo said:
This shit is not what your eyes see.

N0cFtrxv3MR060b4.jpg



Neither is this:

EvAUUya4JQZHfiGp.png



No, stop it. Don't even think about it. You can clearly see what's outside the tunnel in real life. And yes, you can see outside your door or window when it's a bright day outside. Try it now! Amazing, right?

Whenever i see discussions about this completely crappy effect in modern games, i see so many defending it as being realistic because "this is how our eyes work". Really? All you see outside your window is a bright white shine and nothing else? Well, i'm sorry but if that's how your eyes work you must have them checked immediately.

This isn't eye adaption, this is just bad auto exposure settings. This is how crappy cameras work, not our eyes. A lot of games turn this effect to 11 because if you can show it, why be subtle about it?

Just look at it, look how in the first picture the white car turned to silver because of the intense, out of boundaries exposure.

I fucking hate it.

/rant
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Some people will bitch about anything
 
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I like it when the effect isn't too over the top. But I tend to like other effects like vignetting, film grain, lens flares, etc.

The only one I really dislike is chromatic aberration.
 
Kacho said:
This why I adore older games. None of the crappy cinematic stuff like this. The vignette effect is by far my least favorite. It makes my unconsciously strain my eyes.
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Yeah, vignette is probably the second worst for me, first one being the auto exposure of course.
 
Agreed. It's dumb.

Like chromatic aberration, the realistic effect everyone loves, the auto exposure effect is merely emulating a shitty camera and bad lighting in cinema.
 
Kuranghi said:
I agree its frustrating but games that dont do this have a flatter overall look when showing interiors and exteriors simultaneously, its a trade off.
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I don't remember any game that looks any better or worse, lighting wise, for not having this. Older games look completely fine to me. Can you give an example of this trade off?

But even so, i prefer whatever regressions older games had for not having this. It can't be worse than not being able to see anything or the image adjusting the lighting as if you have some kind of auto-adjust brightness on your TV/monitor.

justiceiro said:
Yeah, I hated Ubisoft games for the entire last gen because they used this saturation so much. No idea how it is this gen.
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Really bad. Almost all games do this, some more than others.
 
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Some game use this as a trick to transfer between inside lighting lut and outside lighting lut , Its very smart actually . Sometime to increase performance the outside/inside doesnt even have lighting until you step in/out .
 
I really, REALLY hate that graphical glitch so much, I wonder why it's not optional, I literally developed a automatic body response to when going out of zones to literally close my eyes for some seconds and I do it even with many games without that problem
 
When I move from a bright room to a dark room (or vice versa), there's a short transition period while my eyes adjust to the new lighting conditions. This transition period can certainly vary depending on my physical condition and age. After being in a dark room for a while, I can perceive more detail than if I'd just entered the darkness. I'm familiar with this effect not only from cameras and lenses.

However, I have to agree with the original poster that in games it's often greatly exaggerated and more distracting than realistic.
 
This shit is an abomination OP.

Luckily some ue6 games allow to disable it in the engine.ini

[/Script/Engine.RendererSettings]
r.DefaultFeature.AutoExposure=False

Things that always get turned to the left with me are:

Motion blur
Chromatic aberration (the clue is in the fucking name)
Lens flare
Film grain
 
MGS5:TPP has it and it's dialled up to the extreme to the point that you can't see for a second or two when it kicks in. It's obnoxious and there is no known way to disable it. The only silver lining is that it also affects enemies in the same way.

Eyes adapting to different light levels is absolutely a real thing, and it's why pupils dilate: to control the amount of light received. They dilate in the absence of weak light and constrict in the presence of strong light. If you get up in the night and have to turn a light on for a few minutes, try keeping one eye closed the whole time. When you are back in the dark you will find that you see better in the dark out of the one eye that wasn't exposed to light.

But this effect is far more subtle both in speed and extremeness than how games do it for the most part.

MGS3 actually did it correctly. When you enter the caves for the first time it's very dark, but over the course of a few minutes there is a subtle shift. It's proven in one of those fact and Easter egg type videos, but I don't have evidence to hand.
 
kat_on_the_roof said:
When I move from a bright room to a dark room (or vice versa), there's a short transition period while my eyes adjust to the new lighting conditions. This transition period can certainly vary depending on my physical condition and age. After being in a dark room for a while, I can perceive more detail than if I'd just entered the darkness. I'm familiar with this effect not only from cameras and lenses.

However, I have to agree with the original poster that in games it's often greatly exaggerated and more distracting than realistic.
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Soodanim said:
Eyes adapting to different light levels is absolutely a real thing, and it's why pupils dilate: to control the amount of light received. They dilate in the absence of weak light and constrict in the presence of strong light. If you get up in the night and have to turn a light on for a few minutes, try keeping one eye closed the whole time. When you are back in the dark you will find that you see better in the dark out of the one eye that wasn't exposed to light.

But this effect is far more subtle both in speed and extremeness than how games do it for the most part.
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It's not about subtlety, games don't try to simulate eye adaption at all.

Eye adaption means your eyes adapt. So let's say you are in a dark room and you open the window to see the bright day outside. Eye adaption means it would take 1 or 2 or 10 seconds before you can see clearly outside, right? But all this time you are still inside the room.

But that's not what games do. In fact, i don't think any game ever has done the eye adaption thing. Because in games, if you sit in dark room and watch outside a window, the outside will ALWAYS look like a white bright flash. Not for 1 or 10 seconds or a whole day. It will stay like this bright flash forever and the only way to actually see outside is to MOVE towards the window. The "adaption" happens as you go closer to it. The closer you get and more of the screen covers the window instead of the room, the clearer you see outside.

Just try every game that has this effect and you will see there's no such thing as eye adaption, in every game you have to move the actual character/camera to be able to see anything.

In conclusion, this is not eye adaption, it's the auto exposure setting in a camera that has limited range. It's what you phone camera sees, not your eyes.
 
Let's make the screen so bright that the player can't even play correctly.

Someone thought that this was a good idea it seems.
 
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nkarafo said:
It's not about subtlety, games don't try to simulate eye adaption at all.

Eye adaption means your eyes adapt. So let's say you are in a dark room and you open the window to see the bright day outside. Eye adaption means it would take 1 or 2 or 10 seconds before you can see clearly outside, right? But all this time you are still inside the room.

But that's not what games do. In fact, i don't think any game ever has done the eye adaption thing. Because in games, if you sit in dark room and watch outside a window, the outside will ALWAYS look like a white bright flash. Not for 1 or 10 seconds or a whole day. It will stay like this bright flash forever and the only way to actually see outside is to MOVE towards the window. The "adaption" happens as you go closer to it. The closer you get and more of the screen covers the window instead of the room, the clearer you see outside.

Just try every game that has this effect and you will see there's no such thing as eye adaption, in every game you have to move the actual character/camera to be able to see anything.

In conclusion, this is not eye adaption, it's the auto exposure setting in a camera that has limited range. It's what you phone camera sees, not your eyes.
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You trimmed off my descriptions of eye adaption happening in MGS3 and now I'm sad ☹️
 
It's a really bad graphical effect. And to make things that much worse, most games don't even have an option to turn it off.
 
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