Bloom in Path of Exile

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DreadLordAvatar wrote:

Less.
Is.
More.
Y’all.

I generally agree.

I appreciate the art of PoE a lot, and I love that it's not cartoony polygons. But some stuff is just "a hat on a hat" -- that Orion Supporter pack? I mean... that portal is like 4 portals mashed up. Cool concept, but just too much going on.

Also, so many of the most famous players are all about the maths... It's min-maxxing and speed running... I think a lot of players end up taking for granted the beauty of the game world because they don't' think of it as art, but as a grind and competition. Remember in the early days when players would go into the game files to reduce the polygon renders to simple blobs and get rid of shadows to improve performance? They just wanted to kill shit and get cool loot; they didn't care if it was beautiful.

I love that GGG is standing by its artists and I think a lot of the success of this game is because of the attention and care to art and storytelling. An ARPG doesn't really NEED that to be fun, but PoE really delivers a beautiful grind.

That being said... I agree that the art -- in some places -- would benefit from a reduction in complexity. I realize achieving verisimilitude without uncanny-valley is a delicate and sophisticated balancing act. But sometimes for the sake of function, art has to compromise.

OK: here it is buried in the Harvest launch patch notes. Let me be clear, how does GGG expect any normal gamer to understand that there are two settings based on this announcement?

*** Alongside improvements made to Path of Exile's engine, we have changed the post-processing settings so that two specific ones are separately exposed: reducing the intensity of the new Bloom effect and disabling Blur effects (such as those played when transitioning into or out of an Incursion).

Can I suggest a slider with logarithmic scaling?

Let people pick between 1/64 brightness, 1/32, 1/16, 1/8, 1/4, 1/2 and full. They don't need to be labelled with numbers, just 'bloom intensity' - most people perceive 'twice as bright' as just a little brighter.

If you need more granularity between those, you can add sqrt(2)/64, sqrt(2)/32, etc etc

for me at least normal bloom is too blinding but on slight everything is pretty visible

* excluding delve flare that one is still a white blob on slight :)

Solid, interesting, reasonable and detailed explanation of things as per usual :)
It's unfortunate that some people either refuse to read or comprehend.

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"We can't just turn outright Bloom off, or else various effects will not be drawn as the artists intend them to"

Who says we *want* those effects floating around in the first place? There's so many particle effects already the screen is a blur of bullshit as is.

We want as many particle effects as possible stripped away so the game is visible.

If you think we WANT the amount of particle effects already present, let alone MORE of them, you have no clue what your fans want.


BLOOM OFF, REMOVE PARTICLE EFFECTS IN GENERAL. PLEASE.

Call me whacky, but wouldn't the best solution simply be to make those effects that players need to be able to see not rely on bloom so that players could disable bloom entirely to prevent visual overload and the resulting physiological effects?

That seems like a better alternative than just "let's see if lowering the baseline helps". Some people actually need it off. Entirely.

GGG -> Overhauls old system to improve performance
Entitled Playerbase -> Goes absolutely bonkers over some visual bugs

You can't please them all.

Keep up the good work GGG. Performance improvements from new Vulkan renderer and these new bloom effects are great.

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ergoduck wrote:

I've been playing with Bloom Off by simply disabling it on PostProcessing.hlsl, and yes, by modding the client, and I absolutely don't care about what your artists think.

Yep, I don't care how their artists see the game too, the most important thing is how the players sees the game.

Do you have any tutorial or guide on how to edit those files?
Would really appreciate that.
Bloom is so annoying, especially in delve where in some area you can't see a shit apart from heavy white light.

Hopefully players will start modding the client to their needs and putting guides :) Sick and tired of those forced graphical features.

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Charlesxo wrote:

A slider would be the ideal solution. Starting at 5% to whatever high end that is deemed alright.

beat me to it. this sounds great!

as for the super-bright stuff, They of Tul and dominating blow are really bright but not too bad on slight. there I go rhyming without trying again, I can never escape being a musician.