If you wanted to build elaborate, larger-scale, custom structure(s) completely from scratch, in a blank-slate area that’s optimized for it without any extra fluff that you’re not going to use, what condo map would you choose?
Smooth Dirt, right?
Well, for the past year or so, I’ve noticed people are increasingly building ambitious condos in the default condo’s sky instead of Smooth Dirt.
Medai’s VA-11 Hall-A
TheFragmanMan’s TU mall
Leviathan’s gm_construct recreation. Just to name a couple.
Why is this? Simple:
Because of Smooth Dirt’s lighting.
A bit over a year ago, something happened. The maps ordinary, neutral lighting became extremely blue on the top of surfaces, and green on the sides & bottom, and this become extremely noticeable in the dark where sunlight can’t wash it away. With this also broke the ability to set the environment to pitch black for objects, making it virtually impossible.
I initially only noticed the blueness and maybe misreported it as such on an old condo that preceded my vaporwave one. I eventually gave up working on it because of this.
0.8.6.0 | Set to no sunlight, no moonlight, absolutely not light or color on objects except from glowing canvases. Perfection.
0.8.7.0 | Same settings above, but now uncontrollable light and colors everywhere
0.13.5.0 | Current version.
Just for clarification, I don’t know if this was an unintentional change, but I’m guessing the effect was supposed to mimic reflecting a blue sky from above and grass from below, and I only just noticed as I was recording footage for this thread that items above the main platform are affected differently. They’re brighter, and the sides of an object closest to the grass start reflecting green until they’re utterly consumed when moved away:
Here’s what I can say with certainty though; I’ve seen nothing but complaints about it. It’s legit one of the top things on my wish list to get “fixed.” I truly have to say it this way: it’s awful. Below is another screenshot taken with the environment set to be as dark as possible.
Like…c’mon, surely you see the problem? It’s like the underside of everything has grass stains and algae, with moonlight flooding anything else with the slightest hint of reflectiveness.
And here’s the same scene during the day. Still GREEN!
I feel like each condo has it’s own lighting kinks to work out, but as a nit-picky guy who loves color theory, it drives me nuts that this is most apparent on the condo that’s supposed to best serve as a blank canvas.
It’s super apparent in any winter condo.
You can even see it affect the snow that falls from the weather affect
More personal examples.
You can see why some folks are opting to just not use the map anymore. Snowy builds, scifi builds, basically all indoor builds all suffer. Hell, even if you’re intention IS to have a grassy knoll, moonlit or otherwise, it’s still way overkill.
For this reason, it is my hope that Smooth Dirt’s lighting get a dramatic change, preferably reverted to how it used to be so long ago so that builders don’t have to deal with unwanted light and colors.
