So outside looks fantastic. Lighting, atmosphere, all of that is a big step up. But the moment I go inside my base, everything just falls apart. It’s daytime (only raining a bit), yet the inside of my base is insanely dark, like I’ve built the whole thing underground. The lighting feels really off and everything is heavily tinted red/orange from fires, but at the same time there’s barely any actual usable light in the room. The strangest part is the Final Breath of the Red Mother torch. I placed it expecting it to light the area properly, but it basically gives off no light at all. I genuinely thought it was broken until I dropped a normal torch next to it and that ended up doing a better job. I understand the move to UE5 means more realistic lighting, but right now it feels like interiors get almost no natural light at all, fire lighting is overpowering visually but not functionally, and some light sources might not be working properly. My base is fairly enclosed, but it never looked anything like this before. At the moment it feels like I’d need to fill the place with torches just to make it playable.
Just wondering if this is intended with the new lighting system, something related to Lumen (Unreal Engine 5’s lighting system), or just early bugs with the update? Curious if others are seeing the same thing, especially with certain torches not behaving as expected.
I am facing the same problem. Nights are so dark. Bases interior are like caves and the torches are like 1 lumen bright. Even the Bright Radium torches aren’t helping a bit. Before the update my base was very illuminated but now the torches only drop a bit of light of about 3 feet radius around them.
I’ve seen players complaining about the game being too bright, even during night time. So I don’t know what is going on.
I suspect a big part of the ‘too bright’ is the burst of light you get when stepping out of a base into sunlight. Definitely feels pretty dark indoors to me now. Outdoors at night a torch seems to light to the right level, but much too small an area - what is lit feels bright enough, but it’s only a really small zone around the character.
Yes! This is the problem. The light from torches seems about right but the area they cover is too small. It’s the same thing for the wall/standing torches in bases.
I’m finding the same issue on the opposite end - in places I would hope to be dark. For example, if you seal a room shut out from any external light, it’s still bright inside even though there is no light source. To prove that this is broken, you can pull out a torch in what should be a pitch dark room and you will see almost no change in light.
2.20 gamma here, which I believe is the default. Outside at night, there is at least the contrast of the pitch darkness versus torchlight (just arguably not enough range to help with field of view). But in this scenario, there is no contrast. A sealed room without holding a torch versus holding a torch are equally brightly illuminated.
Thanks for clarifying (yeah, I think 2.20 is the default). I turned down to 1.80 to reduce the extreme glare effects. I’ll try the sealed room experiment when I get some time (looking after my nephew today, so it probably won’t be until tomorrow).
I did some testing in a new project in UE5 and then in a devkit project and realized it’s not that Lumen can’t get pitch dark during the day while indoors. If you bury yourself in a few layers of foundation blocks on all sides, you eventually can get a pitch dark room. The problem then is likely light bleed through the meshes used for construction. The walls are probably too thin, too finely connected at the seams, and the tiny little cracks which would only let in tiny amounts of light are actually flooding the room. So I think the sort of confirms OPs issue too in that light leak/flooding is just washing everything out so that the inside of bases just look flat when interacting with other light sources like wall torches/equipped torches.
(Just a footnote that all the testing I’ve done was indoors during daylight.)
TThe fire torches are so red now, it’s uncomfortable to watch. I had chosen them before for their natural light color, but now they look like something out of a red lantern street.
Actually now I’m not sure what to think. I just built a 10x10 foundation box two blocks thick to prevent light bleed and it’s bright as day inside. Definitely not functioning correctly:
I think I figured out why. It looks like they’re still using the Skylight actor for global illumination instead of just letting Lumen handle it. I think it might be a band-aid solution for the sometimes jarring contrast between light and dark. Either way, I’ve confirmed with some testing that disabling the Skylight actor will allow for pitch dark interiors. I don’t know what repercussion disabling may have on other environments (caves, weather, etc.) but I’d like to experiment with it this way for a while to see how I like it. I will release it as a mod if you’d like to use it.
I just released a mod that isolates Lumen behavior by removing the glow of global illumination that was affecting interiors. Not sure if it will suit your needs or if it causes other light issues as a tradeoff but feel free to try it out!
I’m not sure if it’s something in my settings or something in the lighting system but I get extreme flickers around light sources, particularly when the light changes. Fires and the lights/shadows they cast almost seem to dance in fast-forward. I’m also experiencing light (round spots on the ground and lighting up characters) out in the middle of nowhere where there are no light sources at all. Have reported these through helpshift.
We are quite outside the ranges of the torches at the Summoning Place here.
Because of UE5 lighting. And I absolutely love it.
I hated how sunlight shone through thick stone walls in Legacy… Now in Enhanced, placeable lights still shine through, but natural light at least wont. Hallelujah!
There are pluses and minuses. Torches and the radius they actually light up need work. They need to be less cartoon-y orange too (in my opinion). I’d like torches and lights to actually like the interior (without it looking like someone just pulled the saturation filter all the way to the right) but I do like more realistic lighting in the sense of walls/solid objects blocking light if there are no open doors or windows.
