The worlds got their evenings back

If you've seen our earlier captures of Outer Index 3D, you've seen a player character rendered as a near-black cut-out standing on ground with no shadow detail in it at all. Standing stones read as flat black slabs. Sunsets looked less like dusk and more like a power cut.

We assumed for a long time that this was a lighting problem — that the sun was wrong, or the ambient fill was too weak. It wasn't. The final picture was being handed to the monitor in a form the monitor then decoded as if someone had already encoded it, and nobody had. Everything dark came out far darker than intended, while the bright sky barely noticed. It's why our 2D menus, which take a completely different path to the screen, had always looked richer than the 3D world next to them — a difference we'd been quietly explaining away for months.

In engine · before the fix

That's now fixed at the point where the frame is written to the screen, and the effect on the game is not subtle. Shadows have interiors again. Low sun across a generated ridge reads as low sun. The rock you're taking cover behind is an object with a lit side and a dark side, instead of a hole in the picture.

The practical upshot: some of the screenshots on this site are older than the fix and we've said so where that's true. The next set won't need the disclaimer.