Night Time light suggestion

[Grumpntug 0]

Night time is crazy dark. And while I like the realistic nature of needing tools to see in the dark. Arma 2's lighting system isn't super great so using flares or glow sticks etc, don't really provide much visibility. It would be nice to have SOME light at night like a light moon light. Or even just have the night sky be a very dark blue to give some sort of idea of silhouettes against the night sky so you have some kind of direction.

Currently people say to bump up the gamma and brightness to see but really you have maybe 3 shades of grey on the screen at night so gamma correction doesn't do anything except make your black screen grey.

I go to Europe servers to play during the night so I can play in day light but I like the idea of playing at night if there were just a few tweaks to make it playable.

So if I could make a few suggestions that would be nice to see...

-moon light (nothing super bright just maybe a rim light on edges of trees or other silhouettes)

-Blueish night sky horizon (the zenith of a night sky is black but the horizon is often blue. This would give a slightly lighter backdrop for silhouettes on the horizon allowing for night time navigation without making night time much brighter)

Loving the game though guys. As some one who gets home late a good night time is important though.

[jockurt 4]

Moonlight does already exist on some servers.

[oktyabr 53]

This has gone back and forth a hundred times as well. People complain about how well the gamma boost works (on some hardware, not all) so the night is made darker and now no one can see, at least without NVGs.

I think the solution is just to make the night even brighter than before so no gamma boost is needed. Shadows and color desaturation still make night time spooky and hard to navigate. It's maybe a difficult thing to fine tune from a coding standpoint but maybe going the other way will work better. Perhaps compensate with more fog at night.

[ElGandarko 0]

There already is moonlight, and silhouettes are not hard to see against the sky.

What I would propose, rather, is more ways to create light. Chemlights and flares are all fine and good, but flares produce too much light and chemlights not quite enough.

Their are torches, though these typically require that you drop your handgun, or you swap out a weapon for one with a flashlight. Both of these are terrible, as the G17 is a fairly awful piece of gun, and the Remington isn't something you want to run around shining a flashlight from.

As for the torch itself, unless you have a group of people, it is completely useless. The handgun is usually the players zombie killing weapon, unless they have a winchester/crossbow. In this case, the only good gun to carry with a flashlight is a winchester, as the ammo for it is abundant and it is an effective zombie slayer. Whereas the crossbow... It has its merits, but the lack of bolts and the massive amount of inventory they take make it a massively impractical weapon. Being able to take bolts from corpses helps, but not enough.

I can't think of many solutions to these problems, personally I think night time is fine. It is only painful when it is absolutely pitch black, in which case it can be impossible to navigate.

One solution, however, would be the introduction of a crafting system. I've heard this idea tossed around a few times, and while I'm not sure of how plausible it is with ArmA, it would make for an amazing feature. With a crafting system, the player could potentially find tape and a flashlight, and could then tape their flashlight onto their weapon of choice.

As it stands, that is my only idea so far, pertaining to light sources anyway. Unless more weapons were to be introduced with flashlights, or if flashlights could possibly be made into a tool rather than a weapon (Doubtful), the only other options are to simply add a few extra light sources the player can use.

Oh, and a final note, I have also heard people tossing about the idea of fixing power stations to light up towns for awhile. This idea sounds awesome, and could create quite an interesting dynamic between players. I have little more to say about it, but just thought I would bring it up.

All in all, I enjoy night time as it is. I would be happy to see more sources of light introduced, though it is not a very high priority in my mind.

[startrekern 88]

What most people do not realize is that the Gamma/blah trick is completely useless without turning up your HDR Rendering.

If you turn up HDR rendering, the moonlight will actually display properly. It's NOT that dark. Actually, it's perfect.

[robollama 1]

i agree and made a topic on this a while back. night is just TOO dark!!

[Lexi (DayZ) 5]

I'm only in favour of brightening the night time experience provided there is, as Oktyabr suggested, more fog. I enjoy the atmosphere of the dark night, the reliance on other senses besides sight, the paranoia, the fear. Most of the time it is light enough to see fairly well during the night. There is a point during the night where it does get a little too dark to see but I feel that's what chemlights and flares were MADE for.

[savedbygrace 3]

I like the random weather and lighting effects incorporated by the RVE. I enjoy "surviving" in a different manner than I did the previous night/day. I feel like adding a few more options for night lighting such as the ability catch hay bales on fire or if you have a Jerry can with fuel and some matches, you can light vehicle wrecks on fire would increase immersion but honestly, the flares are more than enough to light an area when scattered in numbers. It makes you work quick and keeps you from loitering too long in certain areas.

[Butters (DayZ) 0]

i kind of agree night is fine, but..

a few eternally burning fires on the map could be a good idea. realistic? no. game? yes. they'd make great markers, and how players deal with them would be interesting. really only a few though, like 3 on the whole map.

One solution' date=' however, would be the introduction of a crafting system. I've heard this idea tossed around a few times, and while I'm not sure of how plausible it is with ArmA, it would make for an amazing feature. With a crafting system, the player could potentially find tape and a flashlight, and could then tape their flashlight onto their weapon of choice.[/quote']

people seem to really dig this idea! i agree with it. provided you have to pause like switching weapons to turn the flashlight off.

The power station idea could be really interesting. fixing a generator shouldnt need more items than the mod already has.

in effect you'd be fixing a vehicle, and throwing flares. could be a serious king of the hill scenario in an area like that.

[Dullard 6]

I love how dark this game is, both in tone and visually, but...

I think there might need to be more leniency with light sources than what we currently have for new survivors on a re-spawn.

I don't think Rocket wants us to turn our gamma up in-game, but let's face it, I bet almost everyone does. If I'm right, and almost everyone abuses their gamma settings, then I think there is a fundamental problem that needs to be addressed in the game settings.

Ultimately, I don't feel like the level of darkness in game is accurate to the real world. I'm an avid outdoorsman and tend to be more nocturnal in my activity, and it's quite simply just not that dark outside, even on cloudy nights. In the woods, with heavy leaf cover I would agree that the darkness is more appropriate, but in the city/towns/villages where there is a clear sky it usually wouldn't be.

Perhaps an increase in starting flares.

I love knowing that I have a limited amount of flares on spawn and that I'll need to start looting them more vigorously at night, but I feel it straddles the line too closely of being completely fucked if you run out. I don't want to have unlimited flares though.

Side note: why must we carry a flare directly in front of our face? It's probably an issue with the engine, but is it possible to code flares to "clip" on to our person?

Chem-lights in place of (in addition to?) flares at spawn.

Chem-lights have a certain tactical use that flares just don't. They appropriately don't provide near as much light, but they also don't announce your location nearly as obvious as a flare does to Bandits. I wonder how the game would play if chem-lights were standard starting gear instead of flares.

Perhaps flashlight as starter gear.

Flashlight are relatively rare in game, but should they be? Flashlights are extremely common in the real world (though so are watches and matches) and if we have such easy access to guns and ammunition in-game then increasing the spawn rate of flashlights doesn't seem to be too much beyond the realm of reality. I don't know if it would be possible to add battery life to a flashlight, but if so, that would be a possible balancing equation to them not being desired enough. Also, and this may be a limitation of the game engine, but carrying a flashlight and a pistol at the same time needs to be an option.

I'm not sure exactly what the answer here is, and I know this thread will get the "this game is fine, stop crying" response, but I'm trying to look at it objectively. If you need to tweak visual settings and/or look for servers that are still daylight then perhaps, just perhaps an open mind should be kept about the games problems (real or imagined).

I love this game and I love playing at night. Let's make more players do it!

[blackaciddevil 0]

I agree on much said above about keep the night as it is, kind of and add Some more lightsources.

Some suggestions...

- A larger "flashlight". Mobile, but big. Driven by a mechanical generator. Like the one in Metro 2033 or on a bike. Only usable when placed to the ground.

- Battery driven flashlight with a lifetime. Changeable batteries.

- Maybe a simple lighter or matches. A very small lightsource. But it could be very effective sneaking around in houses or looking for loot in town and you dont want to alarm a whole town. Maybe chemlight already does that.

[Savage117 0]

I agree with everything here and id like to add some of my own opinions and ideas.

My first idea is for the flashlight, the hand held one that takes up the pistol slot, my only problem with this flashlight is the fact that it takes up just as much storage space as a pistol, I don’t mind that it takes up the pistol slot, that makes sense to me, what doesn’t make sense to me is that it takes up 3/4ths of the space in my pack, I will always pass one of these up because of that, I cant store it, and my pistol is much more important, even if I have a primary weapon with plenty of ammo. There is no incentive to use this device it just isn’t useful enough for survival, and possibly detrimental.

Second, the location of the flares and glow-sticks on the model, I know its already been said hundreds of time but I want to say it again. In a real situation a person isn’t going to hold a bright object in a dark setting right in front of his/her face, it ruins all vision beyond the light source, and arma did a good job of simulating this. Maybe make it so the character holds it in his other hand off to the side, or below sight level, and make a persons accuracy suffer for the lack of a steadying hand, or clip it to the vest. I don’t think you should be able to clip a flare to your chest or anywhere on your person, Hello! Its fire people, why would you attach it to a flammable object, especially one holding ammo, and all your provisions.

Last but not least, as another poster said, more permanent light sources in the world, just enough so you could make out a town, or city in the distance.

These things are pretty important to me, my first experience of this mod wasn’t very promising because of the issues I had with night in this game. When I first tried this game it was night time on every server I tried, my ping was just too high on any of the EU servers. Every server I went to was absolutely pitch black with the standard contrast and brightness settings, I had no way to navigate and I had no idea where I was. When i used a flare, I could see the ground around me but nothing outside the circle of light, this detracted from the mod for me, not only do I have to travel large distances on foot to find anything, but I could easily walk right past a house or town without ever knowing it was there, and im a easy target for another player. It was so black all I could see were stars and a horizon line, anything under that horizon line was impossible to make out.

[Aerograt 0]

Perhaps compensate with more fog at night.

I think just having more fog in general, even sometimes during the day,

would put people even more in edge when it was around.

[FrIEND (DayZ) 9]

adding SLIGHTLY more light at night-time would be Nice.. but Nights should still stay very DARK

[kaibz 8]

I approve of this thread!!!

[robollama 1]

Bump. I want to see Rocket comment on this

[thegarcia 12]

What most people do not realize is that the Gamma/blah trick is completely useless without turning up your HDR Rendering.

If you turn up HDR rendering' date=' the moonlight will actually display properly. It's NOT that dark. Actually, it's perfect.

[/quote']

Never knew this, you should get that posted somewhere so people know!

As someone mentioned, it definitely is not that dark out at night, even in the middle of no where. Literally in-game it's pitch black, where irl you have some ambient lighting.

I think the sky should be brightened up or the moon give more light. Something needs to happen and it shouldn't be items changing, should seriously be the lighting. Even just a tad bit brighter would be fitting.

[B00tsy (DayZ) 19]

Agree with OP. I tried to boost the brightness and gamma, but it remains pitch black, can't even see my own character. The default ArmA night is way to dark. The alternative is to use a flare so that all bandits in the area know where you are. If you want to die then in the night then pop a flare lol.

[robollama 1]

Bump again. Please adjust this rocket!

[goldtoaster 30]

I still think they should turn on most of the street lamps.

I've seen scripts allowing specific cities and small towns to have electricity.

It's still possible to completely cut out power to the entire island by blowing up the main power plant near Elektro.

[B00tsy (DayZ) 19]

I still think they should turn on most of the street lamps.

That might help a bit to at least have some feel of direction, but the towns are scattered over the map so it will still be pitch black everywhere in between. It probably also takes up a lot of resources to light up every town on a server.

[wolfsburg62 66]

Game is too dark at night without the moon, I makes me not play at night.

[Decoy (DayZ) 0]

Moonless nights are too dark. Increase ambient light to the point that you are at able to distinguish objects, but no further. Right now, it's all flat black against a starry skybox.

Also, the Duct Tape + Flashlight = Tac Weapon idea is brilliant. Make it so.

[goldtoaster 30]

I still think they should turn on most of the street lamps.

That might help a bit to at least have some feel of direction' date=' but the towns are scattered over the map so it will still be pitch black everywhere in between. It probably also takes up a lot of resources to light up every town on a server.

[/quote']The lights would cause stress if they were an addon but they're not. They're part of the game by default. It won't cause any stress.