Darker Shadows?

Stardock actually released some teaser images showing that they were still working with the shadows, the end result did look darker. So that will eventually be done in a future patch. I believe you'd need to look at some of the shaders in the PipelineEffects folder, but please don't edit them directly, copy them and make it a mod.

Make sure you have ship mesh highlight filter off. Also turn off skyboxes as they add more reflection on the ships.

Edit - It seems the highlight filter only applies if shadows are off...

Maybe you can look at fx files for shadows.

Ships have some kind of MinShadow entry in their entity file, though I haven't messed with it yet.

Increasing it makes ships appear brighter when you zoom in. Otherwise they look pretty dark.

Hmm. Very curious. What would be a good neutral setting for that? 0? Or 0.5? Some ships have very different settings for that, and I'd like to unify them all...

Depends on your ships DA texture luminosity (Green channel) map and how bright you want them to be. Basically those lines in the entity file seem to be a lazy way to globally change the luminosity of an entity without having to change the texture every time (I used to do it the hard way until I figured it out, the results were basically identical to a global brightness increase on the luminosity map).

Min and MAx Shadow in the entities does add light, but psy and I agreed that it makes the models look like a cartoon. I set everyone to 0.000000

I don't even like the new shadow system, it gives the whole model a general lighting effect that is not near as good looking as the light gradually turning to dark. Once again, looks like a cartoon.

I usually use something like 0.1-0.15, though it's not uncommon for me to use <0.1 at times. Unfortunately this is not a setting that tends itself well to uniformity, because as GoaFan mentioned, it's heavily dependent on a ship's DA texture.

Are those only active with that ship mesh highlight filter thing on? Because I always, always have that off. I changed one ship from 0.1 min 0.8 max to 0.0 for both as myfist0 does but I don't see any differences.

I don't think any of my DA textures have anything in the luminosity channel except for the one DyiithJhinn circuit texture that doesn't even work properly because sins bloom doesn't display against meshes. lol.

correct. Those are only used with the highlight filter. The light channel in the da texture can be used to illuminate an entire ship but I keep it all black too except for areas I want lit up. 

Alright. I thought that might have been what it was for initially but I really wanted to be sure.

The setting in the entity is a lot better if you do need to add some extra brightness to the ship.
The 2 different settings;

minShadow 0.200000
maxShadow 1.800000

allows for zoomed out, which is close to switching to icon, to be set brighter where it actually needs it, zoomed in rarely needs the extra light.