But with it, unfortunately also a number of issues which I'd like to highlight here.
Testing setups:
I've taken 2 jobs, one far north in Sweden and one far south on the Mediterranean islands (corsica etc.) to have an impression of lighting at different latitudes.
My hardware is an RX 590 on the graphics side with pretty much everything except SSAO to max (AO is set to medium because high would cause weird artefacts when close to other 3D objects in the foreground losing the shadow)
My general observations are that driving at day time and late dawn/early dusk is fantastic but driving at night and early dawn/late dusk most definitely needs some tweaking.
- The most jarring issue at night is that pretty much all (directional) roadsigns are much too bright and become unreadable due to HDR bloom (at any decent distance) as a result. While traffic signs seem to be very much underlit making it difficult to see any traffic rules in effect (speed, give way, no stopping, etc.) until you are pretty much completely on top of it.
The directional roadsigns are also lit very inconsistently, occasionally having just a background be brightly lit but not the part you need to read, or more regularly just having text brightly lit (actually much too bright as if you have your highbeams on) but you can't see the surrounding arrow or distance indicator (see screenshots) - Lighting of the cabin interior is strange. With more clear lighting from environmental lights, it's more obvious that interior cabin lighting acts as if the truck "doesn't exist", and e.g. having a beacon light on the very rear of the trailer bathes the cabin in flashes of orange light as if the haul and the back of the cabin don't exist. The same goes for other environmental lights like traffic lights and street lights: it is as if the cabin's exterior doesn't exist for those. The sun however is properly masked by it, which gives a really strange dichotomy.
- The overall resulting lighting during the daytime is rather bright in general which makes vegetation look flat and actually takes away from the realism. Perhaps the overall HDR range is narrowed too much causing some of these issues and needs to be broadened to provide a slightly more contrast-rich image (and reducing overillumination at night as well)?
