C13 AEGIS 2.0 | LCS is here

As I teased a bit ago, the moment is now at hand, and C13 AEGIS 2.0 with Pure LCS support is here. The road from the teaser to here has admittedly been surprisingly long, but I'm happy to finally share with you the fruit of my labor.

What you're looking at is a double pack of C13 AEGIS 1.89 for Gamma and 2.0 for LCS. The filter ini is identical, but Pure will load the appropriate script based on the selected WFX. Should be a plug and play, painless transition.

So let's talk about LCS, or rather Pure LCS. Once dialed in, the differences between gamma and LCS aren't that huge. A good thing, given how phenomenal C13 AEGIS looks on pure gamma (pretty much best looking filter in the realistic category, not really a contest). But the differences that are there, stack up.

World Lighting

Pure LCS leans into what Gamma opened with ambient V2, with a heavy focus on radiosity ambient light, that gives us that soft look that you might get from more ambient aware rendering engines. That soft lighting that you've come to know C13 AEGIS for, can be taken a step further with LCS and C13 AEGIS 2.0. Fog has also seen massive improvements in Pure LCS, so much so, that a fully custom implementation is no longer necessary.

Lights

Lights have always been a massive issue for Assetto Corsa with CSP, and the reason was gamma color space. Remember in Sol, where you could see headlights light up the road even in broad daylight? Pure gamma, combated this by raising world lighting levels so far above artificial lights, that those would be all but drowned out. The downside? - neither AC, nor CSP could reliably handle such high luminance of the world, so many things required workarounds, and emissives required modulation, to be appropriately bright in different exposure conditions. And LCS? Well due to appropriate light addition math, lights get appropriately drowned out on sunlit surfaces. This enables C13 AEGIS 2.0 to run ridiculously low world brightness, which makes exposure easier to manage, and allows for no fakery with lights whatsoever. What you see is what you get, all lights are the same brightness at all times!

Limitations

There are of course caveats. LCS isn't quite there yet at CSP level. Issues with shadows, weird cubemap behavior, SSLR funny business, and especially the behavior of glowing emissives. These things will either require content updates, or fixes in CSP. Something will give sooner or later, but be aware of this if you're experiencing "strangeness".

The future

Is there even anything left to do? In a word, yes. I'd like to spend more time exploring the new exposure paradigm, and adjust how I use various aspects of the exposure calculation to adjust scene aesthetics. Perhaps lean further into tonemapping level adjustments, specifically for edge case and combined parameter compensations (things like low screen space exposure measurements in situations with high overall scene brightness). It's a whole new ball game, and i'm here to play. But for now, C13 AEGIS 2.0 is here to keep the throne warm.

As always, thank you so much for your support. It means the world to me, and really helps the C13 project grow and experiment with more exciting things to bring you guys.

Download post for Patrons, as usual, coming ASAP