C13 AEGIS 1.49

Hello my dear patrons, and other onlookers, i hope you are well! It's been a while since the last Patreon filter upload and that's largely due to the rapid prototyping and development/fixing (honestly i broke a lot of stuff so it felt mostly like fixing), during the internal 1.48 phase. So we've skipped a wider 1.48.X and moved straight to 1.49.
I'm not sure how much y'all enjoy me getting overly technical with these update posts, but do leave your preferences in the comments!
So let's talk about all the new things since C13 AEGIS 1.47. 

Tone mapping

• Reworked base curve, to be almost linear at night - improves the dynamics of night visuals, making things pop more
• Readjusted clipping limits to prevent ugly blowouts
• Re-did the entire color space transform. Reds more reliably blow out towards orange, cleaned up green tones to pop more.
• Reworked the saturation pass and placed a clamp on maximum saturation at tonemapping level

In the end i ended up redoing the colorspace transform 3 times to tune out all of the major issues, while retaining the look i was... looking... for *sigh*. But! The end result, in my opinion, is somehow strangely color correct, further improves the yellows without using any type of post color grading (which causes ugly banding no matter how gentle you are with it), really punchy with the greens and blues, and, improves overall visibility. There is a mild trade-off whereby nights are slightly darker once more, you can tune that out with the "Maximum exposure" slider

Auto-exposure

• Fixed the exposure threshold, which is a complex technique exclusive to C13 Aegis that gives the Auto exposure a "camera" quality. It has been somewhat broken for a bit, but it's properly re-balanced now. (hopefully)
• Adjusted AE target weight based on ambient light luminance - lowered base AE to pre 1.47.1 levels, but adjusted progression to make twilight brighter.
• Tweaked how AE and tone mapping interact to lessen night black crush.
• Adjusted how AE target scale works.
• Increased AE limit, also made the "max exposure" slider more powerful. Increase this if night brightness seems low to you. - see above

Auto exposure is a big corner stone of my work, having been something i've focused strongly on since Sol 2.1(ish?) and Camera Obscura days. A fancy thing i do in AEGIS is limit the range of the actual auto exposure, and then modify tonemapping beyond that point. This got a touch wonky lately after trying to fix some night darkness issues, but i'm happy with it's behaviour. If you find it too dark at night: see above. Beyond this i played with increasing the base AE values in 1.47.1, but found that colors quickly got fucky. Assetto Corsa doesn't like to be bright and even with all my tone mapping and colorspace woo, i cannot seem to keep it in a good place just yet. But hey, eternally evolving project, right?

Filter ini level changes

• Adjusted glare shape: new star method, lmk if you like it
• Lowered base bloom a bit to improve clarity

So, in a controversial move, i have opted to replace the vertical line styled 2 streak star glare with a FOV related rotating 4 streak asymmetrical star. I like it, initial testing has proven favorable, but do let me know if you hate it with a flaming passion that could scorch the world. There has also been a mild reduction to base bloom levels that hopefully lessens the "blurry" effect some people have been noticing, yet doesn't effect my "light painting" technique.

Miscelaneous

• Minor saturation progression adjustments to complement the tone mapping changes
• Minor sky and reflection brightness tweaks
• tweaked sun and ambient light hue
• reduced sun blinding with GADU spec godrays off
• saturation progression adjustments

The new tonemapping made too many things feel green. Had to fix it, did it via world lights. Beyond this, the sun blinding for default settings has been further reduced, but you can find all that tasty power safely tucked away behind the GADU spec godrays toggle.

This update has been arguably huge, but i'm very happy with it. I see the path towards a public release for the first time since 1.46. Thank you so much to all of the supporters, your feedback and support really do mean the world to me.