[Repost] RTW 2010 vs G1 2014

[Keshi 436]

 

 

 

 

 

 

these are somewhat the oldest i got...sadly i dont have the old old old ones anymore

[nzane 1]

Ye I still have those shaders in an old zip file somewhere on my PC

[IAmDisappointSon 45]

On 5/26/2018 at 10:10 PM, Obvious Lesbian said:

APB went from a nice bright city to an ugly second life grunge fest.

with grown patootie men using voice changers to raise the pitch of their voice. ew

On 6/1/2018 at 8:24 AM, Dopefish said:

Another visual feature that has seemingly been removed from the current game, are the clouds shadows, as seen on the rooftops at 5m 30s in this video:

 

 

Aside from the cloud shadows being removed it seems like the clouds themselves have been almost entirely removed by G1.

[Dopefish 248]

4 hours ago, IAmDisappointSon said:

with grown patootie men using voice changers to raise the pitch of their voice. ew

Aside from the cloud shadows being removed it seems like the clouds themselves have been almost entirely removed by G1.

That's because of their color correction, which make the sky look blown out. You can clearly see the sky with some shader edits:

Edited June 6, 2018 by Dopefish

[IAmDisappointSon 45]

On 6/6/2018 at 2:34 AM, Dopefish said:

That's because of their color correction, which make the sky look blown out. You can clearly see the sky with some shader edits:

That's a very good way of showing it, but I believe that in addition to the fact that the color grading ruined it all, there's also the iris effect they've added. I've been doing some digging and I couldn't find any instance where RTW had an iris effect. This allowed the old version of the game to have consistent color and light levels. The Iris effect APB has right now seems to amplify the effect of the color grading. For example you mentioned the color grading made the sky look "blown out". This is amplified to an extreme by the iris effect, as when you look at a dark spot in the game the sky becomes completely cyan and concrete on the ground becomes yellow. When looking into the sky, which should be the brightest part of the game, the screen darkens and all the cyan goes away leaving the actual color of the sky and clouds. On top of that I believe game assets have been messed with heavily. In your screenshots the clouds are clearly visible, but are mostly white and lack shading that used to be present in RTW. The tampering with the clouds is supported by the fact that when G1 initially obtained APB, they did something which basically removed clouds from the sky entirely, then they added them back in a way where they looked like patootie.

 

Your screenshots really helped with understanding this. Also correct me if any of what I said was wrong.

 

 

 

 

I'm pretty shit at explaining things, so bear with me.

The main cause isn't just color grading, but is a combination of poor contrast, and fog being too dense. The images of Dopefish's shader edits appear to either have fog disabled, or fog heavily reduced. As a result the clouds are much more visible, but they are still blown out(meaning parts of the clouds are so bright they clip to white). This is because of the contrast being way too high. The bloom option in APB has been set by G1/RP to heavily increase contrast instead of actually applying a proper bloom effect(the glow of lights). I don't know why they did this.

 

 

My proof for the fog being too dense is this video I made a while back. During mid-night in APB, when the fog is the most dense(basically black and reduces your view distance to like 50 meters) me and a few players decided to use a garbage truck to launch our cars up into the sky. As shown in the video below, the clouds are barely visible if not visible at all when in the fog, but as my van launches up into the air out of the fog, you see that the clouds are there and clearly visible.

 

Bear with the shitty music

 

 

I'm too lazy to provide proof during mid-day or sunset, but if you want you can log in and take a look. During mid-day there is a dense cyan fog, and then during sunset there is a dense red fog. RTW versions had fog too, but their fog was clear somehow.

 

 

 

Edited July 10, 2018 by IAmDisappointSon
Reply was initially inaccurate