With VO now being played on a multitude of devices, screens will vary greatly. I would love to see a slider or other option to increase the brightness of the game. Currently, on my note 5, it looks the best when the phone goes into "direct sunlight brightness mode" while the screen is in shade. I've got to doubt that the game would look much better to more people, as it seems VO is rather dark. I know space is dark and all, but as it is, it's too dark.

Thoughts? Comments? Suggestions?

+1

It should be kept in mind that there are different kinds of "dark".

We can gamma correct, or otherwise increase the brightness of the image we render. But that does not increase (or adjust) the backlighting of the device, which is what actually makes your screen brighter. The contrast properties of the device will vary considerably on different (hardware) backlight/brightness settings, and those are basically things you can define manually through the device's respective properties.

A slider like you describe might be helpful to some players, but I'm not sure it would do anything like what you're expecting.

Off topic from this, but related, I am looking at trying to compress the dynamic range of our rendered output, to basically make better use of the average display by adjusting contrast and applying a degree of "unsharpen masking" in the final output. But, this is a post-process effect, which we may not choose to do on mobile, due to performance impact.

even if this were implemented, we would have an option to turn it off, right?

Actuallythe game befomes so unplayable under direct sunlight that it might be acceptable to saturate the image. So maybe calling it a saturation slider will be better.

Under direct sunlight, there isn't much the game itself can do, as incarnate said.