Regarding Lens Flares

In response to our recent update regarding lens flares, many of you expressed their concerns, arguing that they don’t want the impression of viewing the game through a camera but rather a person’s eyes. We hear you and this is what we came up with.

Anatomical Realism

Have you ever noticed how your nose is always in your field of vision? We recreated this effect by adding a blurry chunk of flesh to the lower half of the screen.

Customizing the size and shape of your nose would take things a bit too far though, sorry.

Field Of View

Film cameras can have a wide variety of focal lengths depending on the attached lens. The human eye, however, sports a staggering 180° field of view. So, rather than allowing you to choose the FOV freely, we set it to a fixed 180°.

Quake pro-gamers: “I see no issue here!”

New Gameplay

To round it all off, we added Blinking Gameplay, requiring you to blink your eyes regularly to prevent your vision from becoming blurry. Blinking is bound to BACKSPACE.


Third Person Camera

Last but not least, in our effort to emphasize the fact that you’re actually viewing the game through a person’s eyes, we had to make changes to the way the third person camera works. 

Humans tend to lose consciousness after about 15 seconds when being exposed to the vacuum of open space without protection. Therefore, we decided to allow you to use the third person camera for only 15 seconds at a time before asphyxiating. We could have put you in a spacesuit here, but given the fact that the visor would probably cause lens flares again, we settled for this solution.

Also: projectiles will hit you in the face!

On A More Serious Note

Noses, blinking and FOVs aside, we really did hear you – and will implement an option to disable all lens flares in EVERSPACE 2. So, just like your brain helps you filter out all those noses and blinks, we’ll let you filter out our beloved lens flares. 

Seriously, thanks for your feedback and keep it coming!

Marco


PS: Oh, and for those who are (correctly) noting there is no sound in space, we’ve already been feverishly working on a solution:

Don’t tell George Lucas!