With the new Firefall patch comes a new lighting system, and many people find that it makes some areas of the game far too bright during the daytime. Most people will recommend you check your gamma settings, but gamma’s only one part of the solution. Here’s a tip for how to fix what gamma settings can’t!
First, press Alt-` or Alt-F1 – this invokes the Firefall console, where you can adjust a whole range of settings that don’t appear in the normal game options interface. The console will half-cover your screen with a blue area full of text. This is normal, don’t worry – see the screenshot for what to expect (and click for a larger version). And if you’re interested, you can use Page Up and Down to scroll through the console logs and see what your game’s been doing behind the scenes.
Type rd.autoExposure 1, hit Enter, and close the console by pressing Alt-F1 or Alt-` again. Voila! Your game will be much less glare-y. If you don’t like the way it looks, you can change it back by entering rd.autoExposure 0 into the console.
As an example, see these two screenshots. These were taken with Gamma set to 1.5, in the middle of the game day, at Praia Tropical Watchtower. The new Screen Space Emissive Lighting feature was also enabled, but that didn’t affect these shots. (Click the screenshots for bigger versions.)
With rd.autoExposure set to 0:
And now with rd.autoExposure set to 1:
Ahhhhh. Much nicer!
Be warned, though; this setting does reset to the default sometimes, so if your screen seems brighter than it should be, remember to reset it back to 1. And presto, your Firefall brightness is fixed!
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Ahh, I haven’t actually had this issue yet, but is the new feature you’re speaking of the Screen Emissive Lighting system?
No, the screen emissive lighting system was introduced much later than this. This fix was from a patch that revamped Firefall’s world/ambient lighting system, and made areas such as Praia Tropical really really ‘overexposed’ and glare-y.
I remember when the lighting engine was like this, it was great, a bit buggy, but beautiful.