So, sometimes I'm a very stable genius. Sometimes I'm an idiot. And sometimes I just get swept up in the moment and overestimate my own ability. I think this was one of those cases.
Almost immediately after posting 2.26, i went to take some shots of the oldie but goldie BZ viper. And lo and behold, the blue paint is doing something odd. Saturation compression artifacts. I inspect the car paint material, and as it turns out, the body colour is baked with the ao map into txDiffuse. Ok, fair enough, old mod, weird thing, running into tech limits of the approach. Then I take the new WIP Viper that we're working on (more info soon). And wouldn't you know; same damn issue. So I go perusing my tonemapping code (because frankly at this point the jig is up, and I'm well aware this is more than likely a whoopsie of my own making), and a couple of lines that modulate the blue channel for low luminance grab my attention. A couple of commented out lines later, the issue is gone completely. So, this was my bad. Either I was trying to overdo the adjustment, or I should just taper it out further into the mid tones, I'll be looking into in the future. What matters today, is that my fuck up was found rectified.
A brief demo:
Observe the dark blue patches that are all exactly the same colour
And then:
Observe correctly rendered cube map to car body. No over compression or clamping.
So, beyond this, I also took the opportunity to address a couple of things. When comparing to old 2.06 screenshots, I noticed a difference in car "presence". Surely enough, after lowering reflection levels pre-emptively as part of the tonemapping rewrite, and the discovered issue of reflection level control for cube maps being broken with CSP 0.2.7/8p1, I didn't bump them back up. That's now fixed.
The last one is a biggie. Thanks to CSP 0.2.8/9p1 an issue with the look of glowing emissives on LCS was identified and rectified. With the harsh look of older versions gone, i'm now happy to run higher values for these, bringing us back to the sexy look of the AEGIS MODERN SRP skin on gamma. For people who will remain on older CSP versions, there is a version check, so this shouldn't conflict with anything.
Glowing emissives now glow as expected, default values are perfectly fine.
Unfortunately for older C13 AEGIS versions, these will remain muted, as too little flavour light is better than being nuked
General reception to 2.26 has been incredibly good, and i'd like to thank everyone who supports this project. I keep saying that this is the last thing before the next step, but i think it was really worth waiting for the CSP update, so we can have as few workarounds as possible. In other news, new exciting things are around the corner, can't wait to share. Thank you and i love you all.
As standard, download will be in separate post for patrons soon.
sanaiwolf
2025-07-16 14:00:26 +0000 UTCZC
2025-06-08 20:55:29 +0000 UTCZC
2025-06-08 20:55:17 +0000 UTCeugenio ghiretti
2025-06-08 06:23:33 +0000 UTCMilan Lazarcik
2025-06-07 00:20:02 +0000 UTCJessica
2025-05-28 16:22:03 +0000 UTCUKTunedIn
2025-05-14 19:49:04 +0000 UTCFred Schriks
2025-05-14 09:43:40 +0000 UTC