Night time is too dark, lights have flat batteries...game is too dark in general

  • Thread starter Thread starter CoolColJ
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I turned the E.V. down to +0.0
Turned the contrast and brightness up on my TV.

Works better than increasing in-game EV
 
I think we are missing the moon light,because night lightening is much dependent on moon position or weather it is full moon or not. In GT5 there isn't moon lightening, it's always pitch dark.
 
Beiks
I was lucky enough to own an M3 when I was in a college located in the Swiss mountains, needless to say I have experienced a lot of driving at neck breaking speeds at night, on very dark roads that can make Toscana feel like the autobahn. I could always see where I was going, more often than not without even the high beams on; so no, night driving in GT5 is not realistic. There is no such thing as making it more challenging for the sake of gameplay when the selling point of the game is being the most realistic "driving simulator" on the market.
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The new BMW's have special headlights that can move and point towards the road in any direction and whatnot. And other stuff that normal cars can't do. Please tell me you were using a newer M3 so I'm not a jackass. And in this case, the new BMW's in GT5 should have it as well.

And are you really IN Egypt? If so, hope the best for you and your people. It's heartbreaking to know SOME of the things that have recently happened over there.


dzidza
I think we are missing the moon light,because night lightening is much dependent on moon position or weather it is full moon or not. In GT5 there isn't moon lightening, it's always pitch dark.
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This is true. I find it odd. The moonlight should help substantially for vision.
 
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The game is significantly darker at night than real life. Very "inky". Headlights also don't seem to be very effective in the game. The best correlation to a real driving situation I can think of is driving at night in heavy rain, you really can't see anything then much past 20-30 feet. There is little to no ambient reflected light in gt5. Moonlight, heck they could even make it variable (from none to full) would be extremely useful.
 
Cracks me up the plonkers going on about "night time is supposed to be dark"

The OP is about the games LIGHTS and lighting not how dark night is or should be. The lights and lighting in GT5 are not very good for a wide number of people, it's like GT5 is good IF you have a perfect setup. So the lucky ones that do are happy, but are completely selfish tossers when it comes to discussing things with those who do not have the perfect setup. There really are some MASSIVELY selfish people in the GT5 community.
 
Yes is too dark, but, two things, because is night dont mind that you dont receive light from sky, depends of the wheater, but yes, even in night the sky emits light, and IRL our pupils adapt to the dark, anyway GT its too dark.
 
Beiks
I was lucky enough to own an M3 when I was in a college located in the Swiss mountains, needless to say I have experienced a lot of driving at neck breaking speeds at night, on very dark roads that can make Toscana feel like the autobahn. I could always see where I was going, more often than not without even the high beams on; so no, night driving in GT5 is not realistic. There is no such thing as making it more challenging for the sake of gameplay when the selling point of the game is being the most realistic "driving simulator" on the market.
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So you mean in the mountains where there is no light pollution meaning clearer & brighter skies? You don't say.

Sorry for the sarcasm but I had to get your attention. I live over 50-75 miles from the nearest city/highly populated area and the light pollution is still so bad that you can see NOTHING (I mean no further than 2/3m if you're lucky) unless it is a crystal clear night and a near full moon even then, driving without your headlights? Not unless you want to kill yourself or someone else
 
Nurburgring without lights is doable. I've just come to not expect mid-day lap times and drive like I would at night in real life.

Set up:
Amuse 380z, stock with sports softs
Cockpit view
Track clock time set to 23:45

TV set up:
Backlight: 7
Contrast: 66
Brightness: 59
Sharpness: 50
Color: 50
PS3 output at 720p

First lap time: right around 10:00

Hardly impressive an impressive lap time but for a first try by an average driver, I'm sure most anyone can dry at night in this game.
 
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y2kbug
Ok, I just had to register an account on GTPlanet to comment on this one.
At 150mph you are going faster than the lightbeams coming out from the front of your car at roughly 3 x 10^8 m/s?
Some darn twisted logic there.
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Someone doesn't understand that "over-driving your headlights" means that you're driving so fast that you can't stop within the illuminated range.

At 150 mph you're covering 220 feet per second. Low-beam headlights have a range of, at best, ~250 feet. That's 1.13 seconds to notice an object at the edge of your headlights, react, and stop the car. Which is impossible. Interesting fact, your stopping distance at 150 mph is over 750 feet, not counting reaction time. Even at only 70 mph, stopping distance is roughly 190 feet, again not counting reaction time.

Even high beams which may reach 400 feet are still not sufficient for 150 mph driving. They aren't even sufficient for 100 mph driving (~390 feet to stop, not counting reaction time).

So, yes, at 150 mph you are, in point of fact, over-driving your headlights by a large margin. At a mere 70 mph you're over-driving your low-beams.

As for the OP: Adjust your television correctly. Spend an hour or so with a calibration DVD and do a proper levels, color temp, contrast, brightness, and backlight (brightness and backlight are two separate adjustments). It will make a huge difference in what you can see during night races and you won't have to much about with gamma settings. As a bonus, it will make everything else you watch on that TV look better as well.
 
My screen is fine, there's about 10 different contrast/brightness settings, like "Game" and "Movie" and there are these buttons that change stuff.
What drives me nuts is that when you look in the rearview mirror, you only see the opponent car's headlight halo, but not the headlights themselves. What the hell is that?
 
Addixted
What drives me nuts is that when you look in the rearview mirror, you only see the opponent car's headlight halo, but not the headlights themselves. What the hell is that?
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That's called "the ps3 isnt really good enough for this game, if only they hadn't skimped on the RAM quite so much, but oh well hindsight and all that"

so may little things that will be added with nearly no work when they are making the PS4 GT anyway :dopey:
 
Addixted
My screen is fine, there's about 10 different contrast/brightness settings, like "Game" and "Movie" and there are these buttons that change stuff.
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The pre-programmed settings in every screen I've ever seen are crap. It's really important to sit down with a calibration DVD and make manual adjustments based on the lighting conditions in the room. The presets are over-saturated and generally have the contrast set far too high as well. In fact that "Game" preset is generally severely over-saturated and over-contrasty which absolutely kills shadow details.

This isn't about the screen itself being bad, it's about the default presets being tuned to exploit the fact that people are most attracted to bright, vibrant images with high contrast even though that means less visible detail.

If you want a decent guide to calibration, I recommend here: http://www.lcdtvbuyingguide.com/lcdtv/lcd-tv-calibration.html
 
Zenmervolt
Someone doesn't understand that "over-driving your headlights" means that you're driving so fast that you can't stop within the illuminated range.

At 150 mph you're covering 220 feet per second. Low-beam headlights have a range of, at best, ~250 feet. That's 1.13 seconds to notice an object at the edge of your headlights, react, and stop the car. Which is impossible. Interesting fact, your stopping distance at 150 mph is over 750 feet, not counting reaction time. Even at only 70 mph, stopping distance is roughly 190 feet, again not counting reaction time.

Even high beams which may reach 400 feet are still not sufficient for 150 mph driving. They aren't even sufficient for 100 mph driving (~390 feet to stop, not counting reaction time).

So, yes, at 150 mph you are, in point of fact, over-driving your headlights by a large margin. At a mere 70 mph you're over-driving your low-beams.

As for the OP: Adjust your television correctly. Spend an hour or so with a calibration DVD and do a proper levels, color temp, contrast, brightness, and backlight (brightness and backlight are two separate adjustments). It will make a huge difference in what you can see during night races and you won't have to much about with gamma settings. As a bonus, it will make everything else you watch on that TV look better as well.
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You can explain this as much as you like, but there will always be someone coming on and reading the phrase without context, spouting "LOLZ you can't exceed the speed of light!"

Welcome to GTPlanet.
 
Kaz only played some superior betas ;) I don't think it's too bad with the brightness of nighttime! Have you seen some nightdriving at Le Mans? I thought it's worse in real life! Only that standard cars don't have lights (is that even true?) makes it impossible to use them for a 24 hours race...
 
Basilea
Only that standard cars don't have lights (is that even true?) makes it impossible to use them for a 24 hours race...
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I don't know about all the standard cars, but the FGT definitely doesn't have lights.

It is not impossible to do the 24hr Lemans race, because I've already done it with the FGT car, but the night portion was very difficult.
 
aQuarius26
Along with adjusting my TV's display settings, this helped me...

http://www.nicolaspeople.com/ch3rokeesblog/?p=16

fullrgb_test.thumbnail.jpg
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i followed this link and changed my RGB Full Range to limited......wow, what a difference. even the single car view in my garage has vastly increased visibility :dopey:
 
Haha, I agree with the OP, though, waaaay too dark. Even in daylight you can't see the cockpit in most of the cars.

Forza 4's new lighting engine does the same thing, bright daytime outside, pitch black interior.
 
I'm sure anyone whos gone for any "spirited driving" down a pitch black windy road will agree that headlights don't go as far as you'd like them too... nor light up the road as bright as you'd want. I think GT5 just does it justice.
 
Well if anyone cares for the technical reason why this game is so dark at night is because it most likely uses a forward lighting renderer by the looks of things. Like most racing game developers graphics are not their main, primary focus. But GT5 does look great though

NFS Shift 2 though uses a deferred shading path which allows the developers to use the latest technology to dynamically light the pixels easily and have lots of dynamic light sources. This makes attaching lights to cars child's play

Deferred shading is a farily new buzz word used in cutting edge titles like Killzone 2/3, Little Big Planet, Uncharted, etc. You can look up Deferred shading on wikis etc if you're interested
 
sandboxgod
Well if anyone cares for the technical reason why this game is so dark at night is because it most likely uses a forward lighting renderer by the looks of things. Like most racing game developers graphics are not their main, primary focus. But GT5 does look great though

NFS Shift 2 though uses a deferred shading path which allows the developers to use the latest technology to dynamically light the pixels easily and have lots of dynamic light sources. This makes attaching lights to cars child's play

Deferred shading is a farily new buzz word used in cutting edge titles like Killzone 2/3, Little Big Planet, Uncharted, etc. You can look up Deferred shading on wikis etc if you're interested
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I've suspected since long before the game launched that GT5 would have to use a deferred technique if time progression were to be included. Been on SSR7 recently? It should bring standard forward rendering to its knees with so many light sources. Tracks like the Nürburgring and Le Sarthe also show that the fully dynamic, multiple light sources (pit straights, campers etc.) are probably requiring deferred rendering, too. The pitch-blackness of night is another indicator, as this is a hallmark of deferred techniques (played Stalker?) because there is less need for an "ambient" level, since more light sources can be used locally.

You forgot to mention that several indie devs are also using deferred shading. And the deferred shading in SHIFT 2 comes from the "Ego" engine, so DiRT 2 and DiRT 3 have it, as well as the recent Op' Flashpoint games etc.

GT5 is "too dark" because it tries to replicate real-world lighting levels and ranges, but doesn't really properly account for the low dynamic range of the imaging hardware - i.e. most TVs have poor dynamic range, typically worse than your average LCD computer monitor (I actually don't have any problems with the latter). The headlights are also hit and miss, because their projection maths is a bit broken and they are either not bright enough on some cars, just don't reach far enough, or don't cover the near-field well enough etc. etc. Some or all of these issues are complaints of real cars, too.

Headlight upgrades would be great.

Check US_R33's post above. Try changing the colour clamping mode in the PS3 system settings. The "limited" setting is for "poo"* TVs, whilst most computer monitors (and some "decent" TVs) will be fine with "full".

* I jest.
 
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