Progress Update, Problem Solving

The episode about Dark Souls 1 prototype maps is coming along nicely, the video is past the 20 min mark and I'm expecting it to be done no longer than a week from now!

I was originally hoping to mod the prototype maps to help brighten them up, because exploring them in-game can be problematic. They're really, really dark. You have to rely on the light surrounding the player-character to help light up nearby structures, which works for certain, familiar locations, but if I try to show how something looks from a distance? It's no good. Brightness is at 10 here:

Ideally I'd edit the maps to add in a bunch of point lights (? - is that what they're called?), but it turns out that dsmapstudio currently has issues loading the prototype maps. I believe a fix is in the works and should be on the way soon, but I'm happy with a solution I found in the meantime and it completely removes the need to wait; Using debug in-game to crank the brightness and mess with the color settings.

It's a feature I've been aware of for a long time, and it does get used in my videos from time to time. Check out how The Darkroot Garden looks in my Gravelording video (14:45 in):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iRT8D5MWi94&t=885s

It's a little brighter and more blue than it should be. While I don't necessarily see my tweaking of the color as an improvement over the base game, I made it so it was easier to see further into the distance, bringing a bit more clarity to the surrounding environment. I wanted to try my best to make it so the viewer could understand where exactly these scenes in the forest were taking place.

But the difference with the prototype maps is that they're VERY dark, so any drastic changes look completely awful. It's not normally something you can just crank to max and have it look okay, especially with the light that surrounds the player-character just washing things out. So you wind up with nearby terrain that's REALLY bright, and distant scenery that's often still pretty dark and unclear even at max.

Though I realized: When the placeholder maps are already psychedelic, untextured weirdos, what's to stop me from going beyond just max brightness? I also have contrast, color, saturation and hue settings in debug. You can never go too hard with this in regular gameplay of course, because it'll quickly make the game look terrible, but the prototype maps don't exactly need to be any particular set of colors, do they?

So the solution is this, don't include the player in most shots where I want to show wider or distant bits of the environment. That prevents washing things out. You can see how it still doesn't look great with the player left in:

But with these exact same settings WITHOUT the player present, the environment suddenly looks like this, where we can see distant terrain very clearly now:

This is all to say that I never contemplated pushing the lighting and color settings to their limits because of how in most cases it looks awful, but for the prototype maps it actually does a great job of making things clear and visible to the point where I'm no longer worried about modding additional light sources in.