Star Citizen - cockpit lighting issue - inside cockpit too dark

this is the only way to arrive in Lorville, comm’ing for landing permissions surrounded by massive skyscrapers and…. oh, wait a minute, that’s not what this post’s about.

Bright strong daylight outside, yet inside the cockpit is almost SILHOUETTED against the city scene. It’s like there’s no light inside the cockpit when it’s clearly supposed to be streaming through the glass. It’s certainly flattened, in no uncertain terms.

This ain’t right, and I’ll tell you why, “There is no support for or simulation of Real Time Ray-Tracing,” otherwise known as the bouncing around of light within a confined transparent space such as every ship’s cockpit, in Star Citizen. When we made GhostMaster, we ran a custom lighting pass for each light and baked that off into a lightmap so you could turn on and turn off this light-bouncing actually in game.

When you drive your car, in the sunny daytime, the inside of your car isn’t dark. Why? Because the million candle light from the sun above finds it way in through the glass and bounces around inside the car, picking up reflected lighting tones as it goes. Basically the inside of all such mostly-glass cockpits such as these should be shimmering with light.

Now, Nvidia-wise I’ve gone right back to an RTX-demo before all the shitty game companies with their shitty game engines scrambled for the free publicity such a graphics card implementation offered their shitty games. I’m focussing on just the light scattering, light pooling, light re-illuminating feature that Star Citzen needs to brighten up the insides of its cockpits. I’m not even concerned with the world-space reflection aspect of the demo at this point, just the light-bounce that would perform its own internal lighting.

This transformation of the internal/external parity would be UN-BEL-IEV-ABLE in Star Citizen, you’d even get light reflections from your flight suit’s color scheme, especially when your insta-finger was gliding across the MFDs in Free Look (QET) mode. The cockpit view would be crisp and clear on the outside, readable as 3D on the inside.