C13 AEGIS 1.41 RELEASE

This has been quite a wild ride. If you told me after i made 1.32 public that i'd essentially reconfigure the entire tone mapping system, invent my own color space transformation and re-do the entire world lighting logic, i would... Well i would have believed you tbh, since i'm a tinkerer. But it's still a lot of work for essentially marginal gains. We're in the marginal gains territory people, peak ppfilter has been achieved! Which potentially means that we might let C13 AEGIS sit for a while and move on to other projects. But we'll see, and one thing at a time.

So for you, my dear patrons, what is the difference from 1.38? Under the hood, quite a bit actually. While I really like the richness of 1.38, there was a tendency to overcompress lows, and also oversaturate the image. To rectify the situation, I reconfigured the entire tone-mapping curve. With the new color space transformation, we can now run what is essentially high gamma, without killing colors. The result is better low visibility, a touch lower peak saturation, and a very minor decrease in low end contrast. My goal is to avoid harsh visuals and contrast control is a big part of that. 

If you guys miss the punchy aesthetic of 38 lmk, and we'll see what can be done in that direction and avoid saturation clipping and other issues. Be it a preset or a toggle. But if we're going for stable visuals which are also somewhat accurate, this is the way forward.

In addition to an overhaul of the tone-mapping, glare was also reconceptualized. Rather than avoid it, i embraced it. Glare is now always everywhere. But the intensity is low enough to not be obvious. Instead, it functions as a soft paintbrush, painting in light where it's needed. The results must be experienced firsthand, but the subtle softness and luminosity of color is really something to behold.

Beyond these stylistic adjustments, many service updates were done to work hand in hand with the other changes. World lighting was fully reconfigured, ambient light is now much stronger, but the new saturation modulation keeps it from feeling artificial - this further improves low end visibility during daytime, without sacrificing much of the overall image contrast. This of course necessitated an adaption of the auto exposure logic, which is heavily dependent on ambient light strength.

Speaking of auto exposure, there are now two mechanisms that prevent overbright during daytime; one is based on ambient light, and the other on overall scene brightness. I feel they work very well, and generally overly bright scenes should no longer be an issue. 

That roughly covers it, if you have any questions, don't hesitate to ask here or in the discord! As always, thank you very much for your support!