Halloween 2019 broke the light system in mission districts

[Catgorl 67]

UPDATE : As pointed out by members of the SPCT team at the bottom of this thread, this glitch will disappear once the Halloween event ends.


As the title says, sunlight/moonlight and it's shadows no longer looks right in mission districts.

A lighting glitch that has always been present on Social can sadly now be found in both Financial and Waterfront after the Halloween 2019 patch.

 

Since a picture is worth a thousand words, I'll show what's going on trough the use of screenshots :

 

Here's a screenshot from the previous patch (1170) (Left), and a screenshot from the current live (1177) (Right) :

Same thing, a screenshot taken in the previous patch (Left), and a screenshot taken right now, at the same exact time of day (Right) :

 

Screenshot on the left is what characters look like with natural map lighting, screenshot on the right is the same character without any changes under dynamic lighting.
(The maps use a mix of both, and constantly switching between the two when one of them is broken is very, very ugly)

 

Characters & vehicles now have a constant white light shining up from below them instead of sunlight, unless they're in an area that specifically has no sun. (Jangma Square cafe, pictured below)

 

This bug isn't AMD-specific - This is a screenshot sent to me by a friend using an Nvidia card. It's pretty clear that something's wrong with the lights, even during nighttime.

 

Large portions of the map are affected too, as all sections underneath the Financial bridge are now fullbright (as an example).

 

This glitch disappears indoors.

 

I am running APB Reloaded on an AMD RX 580, and I use the Advanced Launcher with the "High Quality" preset.

I have started the game both with and without the launcher's config files, and I get the same results.

I suspect it has something to do with the way the halloween event plays with lights.

This might be nitpicky but I personally can't get over this. It makes the game look far too ugly compared to what it looked like just before.

Edited March 14, 2023 by Catgorl
Updated the post.

[Azukii 92]

Hi there,

This topic has been moved to the PC Bugs and Tech Issues section of our forums.

Thank you.

 

- Azukii

[Catgorl 67]

Even after manually deleting the shader cache, thus forcing the game to recompile it (Which took forever), the game looks the same. Deleting the newly made file and replacing it with the one provided by LO doesn't change anything. Here are some more screenshots to illustrate my point.

 

Screenshot on the left was taken nearly a year ago, screenshot on the right was taken just now after recompiling shaders. Notice that the trees don't have shadows on their leaves anymore.

 

Same story here, screenshot on the left is what it used to look like, screenshot on the right is what it looks like right now. It's really, really distracting.

Edited October 24, 2019 by Haniasita

[FranGT 15]

Being honest, I like the lightning much more like this (at least for the environment). Shadows prior the update were too dark for me, too much contrast with the lighted areas.

Hope we get on the engine update a more advanced menu for shadows and lightning editing so we can choose what we like the most.

Edited October 24, 2019 by FranGT

[Catgorl 67]

11 minutes ago, FranGT said:

Being honest, I like the lightning much more like this (at least for the environment).

I guess ultimately it is up to personal taste, but to me the current lighting just looks fullbright - in other terms, it looks like there's no lighting system in place at all. This could be okay if we didn't have dynamic lights and baked shadows layered on top of it. It's like half the map is trying to look good, and the other half just gave up on shading at all...

 

When the engine upgrade drops, this will very likely be fixed given that the lighting system in 3.5 is drastically different (and more modern), but I'm kind of sad to see this glitch appear now that I was on a non-stop playing spree in this game, taking lots of screenshots to immortalize it in doubts related to the future of it... I just can't stop looking at the weird lights now.

This is Half-Life 2 with fullbright lighting - this room is supposed to be dark.

Edited October 24, 2019 by Haniasita
Illustrated "fullbright"

[FranGT 15]

51 minutes ago, Haniasita said:

This is Half-Life 2 with fullbright lighting - this room is supposed to be dark.

Mat_fullbright 1 right? This is a command I used a lot on a TF2 rocket jump server because mappers were so lame lighting their maps.

I'm not asking for this on APB but at least way less contrast between shadows and light in general (without having to disable Bloom).

[Catgorl 67]

Still no update on this, and I've been seeing more and more players talking about it in the ingame chat.

 

On 10/24/2019 at 11:14 PM, FranGT said:

I'm not asking for this on APB but at least way less contrast between shadows and light in general (without having to disable Bloom).

Since day one APB has had a very contrasted look, it's part of the game's visual style. I can understand people wanting that not to be the case but huge contrasts between shadows and light are part of the game's original design, and are one of the most useful features when you're sneaking around the objective.

Edited October 27, 2019 by Haniasita
Typo... again.

[Kevkof 806]

17 minutes ago, Haniasita said:

Still no update on this, and I've been seeing more and more players talking about it in the ingame chat.

The fog/lighting is a bit different in the Halloween clients, it'll probably just be back to normal after the event

[Catgorl 67]

1 minute ago, Kevkof said:

The fog/lighting is a bit different in the Halloween clients, it'll probably just be back to normal after the event

Thanks a lot, that response is honestly all I needed.

[WhiskeyTangoFoxX 280]

As Kev said, this is gonna go back to normal after the Halloween event ends. This has happened every year since the horseman event was introduced, and is caused by some workarounds to make the fog look the way it does iirc.