Will there ever be practical night vision that players can use?
TL;DRAli Brown can't promise night vision since that's a design decision, but he describes how a more realistic implementation could work and says he would love to explore it.
Well, much in the same vein as you don't want to promise thousands of players to the backers, I can't promise game design features. I think various game designers are interested in it, but I will not speak on their behalf. But what I can do is talk about night vision implementations and how it's done, and leave it to the designers as to what that means in Star Citizen. So in terms of night vision, almost every game up until the last couple of years has done the same thing, which is make the screen go a bit green, change the colors a little bit, brighten it up a little bit, and job done. There's your night vision. So that's fine. We can do that, no problem. But recently, we've started to see people going a little bit further. I don't know if anyone's played Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, but they did a significantly better implementation. It's worth looking at. They really pushed the boat out a little bit further and tried to emulate exactly what night vision does, or a particular model of night vision.
They do the spectral stuff, right?
Yeah, so now they better approximate what each color looks like when looked at under infrared. So they convert the colors that you would see. When art says this is going to be a red can, they do the maths and figure out what that actually looks like under an infrared camera. And the other thing they do is for things that have particularly non-standard, unexpected brightness in infrared, like a reflector or an infrared light or whatever. There's certain materials that will reflect very brightly. The artists have marked this up, so they have this data to give you a much more convincing visual. So yeah, that's definitely [unclear: 'in the payment one']. The one thing we have to be careful of is the amount of artwork we have means we can't just go and ask the artists to flag up every single material they've ever made. But we do already have various markup on materials so that we know the rough surfaces, the types of things they're made of. So we can retrospectively say, oh, all the ones that are made of metal, this is how they should respond. All the ones that are made of reflective strips, they respond like this. So there should be scope for us to do something like that. And that's definitely what I aspire to. I can't promise, because we're not doing that right now. Until design say today is the day you make the night vision mode, that is the day I can talk more freely about it. But yeah, it would definitely be an interesting thing I'd love to explore.