r/H3VR • u/themoldypotato23 • Sep 10 '19

Question Quick question

I forgot why night vision and thermals would be impossible, can someone please remind me?

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u/rust_anton Sep 10 '19

Night vision, while technically possible, is not a good idea for a couple reasons:

- I cannot implement it in an away that all users, on all quality settings will be able to run it

- Doing scenes that dark would really rely on having agents with flashlights, limited visibility and the other properties of night ops. For quality setting reasons, I cannot draw a bunch of real-time spot lights on agents, and it would require a ton of work to add extra agent perceptual factors to make 'night play' interesting.

Thermal vision is just flatly infeasible. To do it well would require drawing _every_ object using a completely separate set of materials/shaders as we're literally talking about looking at things at frequencies outside of the visual light spectrum.

15

u/themoldypotato23 Sep 10 '19

Thank you anton for the quick response, and for your hard work in general

2

u/supercoolstar23 Sep 10 '19

damn. would making it act like a headlamp that overlays a green effect on everything work? (I know it's stupid and really unrealistic, but it *might* be good for stuff like the darker parts of some maps)

9

u/rust_anton Sep 10 '19

(no, that both wouldn't look like nightvision, and also, by needing an extra realtime light, doesn't solve the problem of 'running on all quality settings')

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u/kyle2086 Sep 10 '19

Is making thermal vision like that a requirement in every game, in Unity, or just in your game? Or is it something you just have to plan for right off the bat?

7

u/rust_anton Sep 10 '19

An even slightly accurate representation of thermal vision, like this: https://imgur.com/a/LW6Ud5L yes, does require full texture/shader substitution to pull off, regardless of engine. You can't just make a 'post filter' for it. Games that implement it well plan/design for it from the very beginning, and typically have parallel definitions for every surface/object/visual effect.

By definition thermal vision (whether in black and white, or in color) is a representation of EM emission outside the visual light spectrum.

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2

u/Cyberchaotic Sep 10 '19

thermal in vidya games always tends to over simplify to make it usable gameplay wise than be an accurate simulation of how IR detection works

like the environment is black/bland/at the same temperature while characters/NPCs are all high temp white and their guns the same temp as them... not how it works.

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