Why does everything have to glow so much?

[mortico]

What is it with new games these days... this glow effect was added and suddenly every game I play makes me feel like i'm in a drunken haze and stumbling out of a dimly lit pub at noon in the summer, in the sahara desert (except that it stays glowy forever isntead of just a few minutes).

What's the point of over-using this effect? I figured we would have gotten over it already?

Maybe an option to turn it off? It looks terrible - hides all the good-looking bits of the game's engine.

[Scoobydooby]

You can turn it off.. just lower your texture and world graphics to lower levels.. 3 takes it away for me.

Then again, if you really want to do it right, you go into the .ini in your UT3 program folder..

[Hickeroar]

"next gen" at this stage = lots of glow and blur :-P

[orion119net]

I kinda like it, actually... it gives everything an unreal(aha), dreamlike quality.

Though this is the first real new game I've bought in a while, so it hasn't gotten on my nerves in other games yet.

[dethmanrulz]

if you think this is bad... Medal of Honor Airborne is swimming in glow sometimes... (also UE3)

[VanEck]

One way I found to get rid of some the BLINDING GLOW RAVE EFFECTS was to switch post-processing to "VIVID".

Give it a try... made a world of a difference for me.

[Tanakil]

There is a reason for Glow effect... I don't understand how come NOBODY said it before :

- To make it easy to see stuff from far away.

Example : I see a glowing blue figure far away, I know it's someone from the blue team.

I see a small green glowy figure, I know it's a health pack.

I see a small blue rectangular figure on the ground from far away, I know its ammo.

Ect. The glowing actually got a purpose here.

[Jocked]

I think the OP means the bloom.

[Tanakil]

Hmm, well the bloom is far from being that bad =/ and it doesnt "hide" anything like he said... At least it doesnt seems to hide anything for me, I can still see every details.

[utzBluesman]

What is a blue point in a karate game under UE3 ?


BLUEce Lee!

[Jocked]

What is a blue point in a karate game under UE3 ?


BLUEce Lee!

Jeet Kun Do or Kung Fu, not Karate

[TPSFan]

Bloom and HDR are things developers should have never developed, IMO.

Not because they are inherently bad, but because this is a clear case of them trying to replicate the real world, but instead making the video game world even more unrealistic as a result. They are trying to mimic the how the human eye works... Except this is a video game and not the human eye. Thus, they should stay within the constraints of how video games function and are rendered instead of trying to duplicate how a real human eye (iris) sees things...

[Hickeroar]

One way I found to get rid of some the BLINDING GLOW RAVE EFFECTS was to switch post-processing to "VIVID".

Give it a try... made a world of a difference for me.

Vivid definitely makes the game look best imho. darker darks and richer colors all around.

[martinblank]

Hmm, well the bloom is far from being that bad =/ and it doesnt "hide" anything like he said... At least it doesnt seems to hide anything for me, I can still see every details.

X2....

and this is coming from a guy who played UT2004 with everything set to "lowest" on purpose...

EDIT:
oh yeah, I do use vivid.

[Lulzy]

Bloom and HDR are things developers should have never developed, IMO.

Not because they are inherently bad, but because this is a clear case of them trying to replicate the real world, but instead making the video game world even more unrealistic as a result. They are trying to mimic the how the human eye works... Except this is a video game and not the human eye. Thus, they should stay within the constraints of how video games function and are rendered instead of trying to duplicate how a real human eye (iris) sees things...

They are basically taking something that exist in the real world and exagerate it, much like everything else is exagerated to create an interesting atmosphere.
Don't assume that realism is always the goal. More often than not it's better to stray away from it, because there's little point of making a virtual environment that's just a poorly executed knock off of the real world. Reality is usually something you want to depart from when you play a game.

Sometimes of course, bloom is a poor aesthetic decision that is just done because everyone else does (lens flares anyone?), but I think it works well with the general style of ut3.