Bell curves, reflections and darkness. C13 AEGIS 1.78

Let's quickly preface this by saying that LCS is not something that C13 AEGIS is currently supporting or focusing on. There are movements behind the scenes regarding Pure's LCS implementation, and once it's ready we can talk about what that means for C13 AEGIS. In the meantime though:

I'm seemingly never going to run out of things to change on this filter. Partly that's because CSP and Pure are continually evolving, providing ever expanding options to play with the rendering, and partly because I make dumb mistakes, and get to fix them. More on that later.

But let's talk about what's changed for 1.78.

Reflections, shadows and fog

Quite a bit has been done on the environment side of things. A fairly new addition to CSP allows an additional aspect of reflections to be controlled. Coupled with the CPL that C13 AEGIS already uses, this allows overall reflection intensity to be pushed even harder, without risking the chore like look, that high reflections are known for. But using higher reflection levels is desired, as it provides better chrome visuals, and increases color transference in certain cases. So, the Reflection tweak (enabled by default), will now provide what I feel is better car paint visuals if you're on the latest CSP.

Fog has also seen substantial improvements. By no longer relying on Pure's internally calculated fog color, instead using my own definitions, and by implementing several LUTS to manage intensity, I feel like the fog is in a truly great place (smoke and sand still unsupported). The humidity-controlled haziness now gives a great sense of distance and scale, especially on bigger maps.

Beyond this, the entire ambient suite has seen a makeover, with advanced ambient light, VAO and tone mapping adjusted to give a better, more contrasty daytime look, with a more limited version of "power of the sun" now functioning within base settings as well. This seems to be a balancing act I keep coming back to, but I think that approaching it more holistically, as I have here, is the way to get reliable and globally beautiful visuals.

The devil that is tone mapping

I've wrestled with tone mapping a lot, essentially since day one of my custom implementation. C13 AEGIS tone mapping remains unique, and a leader in this space. It has pioneered many things in AC:

• Fully custom base curve math

• HSV based saturation pass

• A fully custom color space transform bracketing the base curve fitment

And now we're adding another layer to it:

• HDR space hue based saturation management.

Chasing yellows has been a bit of a Don Quixote thing for me, so I said enough is enough. We're losing greens and yellows in the SDR step down, so why not just add headroom beforehand. So add headroom I did. By using a pair of gaussian curves centered on baseline saturation and calibrated hue values, and weighted for hue and saturation ranges, we're brute forcing this problem away.

1.65/7

 1.78

 The improved yellows and greens are clearly noticeable, and I'm very happy with the result. This being done in HDR means we're not technically losing any perceptible color ranges, that would be a problem if this was done with color grading in the filter.

Speaking of tone mapping

Per-preset exposure based tone mapping curve modulation (for real this time)

Sometimes I'm a smoothbrain, whatcu gon do. When I implemented the "Filmic mapping toggle", that broke parts of the tone mapping presets. Essentially night contrast wasn't being modulated accordingly to the preset defined value, but rather to the static value defined in filmic mode. That's now fixed. And the night pop of the base filmic mode particularly is intense.

Dynamic is good, but static is better 

Obviously my entire schtick is making convoluted dynamically adjusting sub-systems and algorithms that shape ac visuals towards what I consider peak visuals. But as the engineering saying goes, the best part is no part. To that end, I've removed exposure based emissive modulation. This results in noticeably boosted emissives at night. With the new AE weights introduced in 1.72 I think most scenarios should be fine, but bad content is out there, and i'm not taking responsibility for bad content looking bad. In my testing the change has been exclusively positive.

Since 1.72 there have also been other tweaks to other subsystems, to mention a few:

• AE has been adjusted for the new tone mapping and world lighting changes

• GT glare has been fixed, it had been misbehaving for a while

• Photo style brightness toggle is back

• Filter now forces camera and mirror emissive boost at highest safe level

As always thank you so very much for your support, it means more than I can describe. You make all of this possible!

Download post for T2 Patrons coming ASAP.