Foreword:
If any of my points belowe can be affected by playing around with the useropts.cfg file, please ignore them.
Green tint at daytime:
Or particularly, I'm referring to the standart days with green sky and without rain.
It begins with a breath-taking sunrise. The city has an intensive green tint and just every single texture in the city looks brilliant. However, as time passes, the green tint decreases and the city starts assuming a more common look. That's not a demerit yet, that one comes at the limit of the day. Apart from some buildings and the sky, the world looses almost all green tint it had and starts looking somehow boring and uninteresting, most of all in Richland. Especially when those yellow shabby ground textures at the main roads and in pedestrian zones start reflecting the sunshine intensively, the graphics really loses lots of quality. Fortunately, it doesn't last for all too long, the green tint decreases and I forget what I found so bad about the graphics. These light reflections are generally very good-looking and give the city a feeling of irreality, but only as long combined with any kind of tint. "Without color", it looks boring, if not even bad.
Again, I agree that the green tint should be more intensive during sunrises and sunsets, but it shouldn't fade away that much. I'd suggest to stop brightning the city at some point of the day and just leave it where it is. The green tint should only disappear during the purple sky days, that would make the standart day look more atmospheric and Sati's day look more special and unusual. And that leads me to my next point:
Light reflection decrease during purple sky days
Just like at normal days, the sunrises/sunsets look absolutely gorgeous. The pink tint both an awesome contrast to the standart green and just rocks. However, unless I mentioned in the update 40 discussion, it doesn't stop looking good after the sunrise ends. The city has a very subtle blue/purple coloration, what makes it look more common and real, and yet so artificial at the same time. However, once the sun unfolds its full brightness, the world graphics maybe reveals its worst side. Maybe the one or other texture looks quite acceptable, plazas like Mara c, Tabor Park w, the Camon Heights c or the Moriah Plaza look so ugly horrible, that I'm really wondering how I could every be that impressed by the graphics. Unnecessary to add, that I change my mind quite quickly when the suns goes down and sunset begins. However, this issue makes me usually quit the game as fast as possible.
My suggestion: Turn off the ground light reflection completely during these days. The intentions behind it might be so good, the way it looks doesn't justify its existence in my opinion.
Summary:
I don't ask to do massive texture changes as it would be a really big project and tons of work. In all my dilettantism, I think all that could be accomplished simply by editing the day/night cycle (and in our case, just the day part of it).
May I repeat, light reflections on the ground look gorgeous as long as they have some sort of tint in them. No matter if it's the standart green, pink or golden/yellow/orange in certain neighborhoods. However, as as soon as the tint fades away and the reflection starts really blinding, it turns from gorgeous to crappy -- unbelieveable but true.
My suggestion is simply to turn down the brightness/increasing the (green) tint during the standart days on the one hand, and to turn down the sunshine reflections about "purple sky days".
Any graphics demerits at night I had recently...
... have revealed themselves as unjustified as soon as I turned off the personal spot light. My impression is that some nights are darker and look more brown and sordid, others are brighter and have kept their dark-green tint from earlier days (before update 40). No matter if it's true or not, since I deactivated the spot light (by the way, thank you for your new user options page, Stack, it really rocks!), there's simply nothing I have to critsize about nighttime. Forget my former concerns (for most).
Grass
I have with display of grass. It seems that it's only visible within a relatively short radius around the camera, if I have to guess I'd say about 20-30 meters. The grass itself rich and juicy, but the textures below it (especially in the parks) have a much more boring character. Looking at a park from some distance from above, let's say a bridge, the grass is completely invisible and the parks looks somehow boring and depressing. And unless I put the camera right down to the floor, it grass appearing in front of me and then disappearing behind me looks kinda ridiculous. However, at night or cloudier/darker daytime (rain, sunrise/sunset), the parks still look extremely beautiful, I guess because the basic park structure has a better colour then.
Now this really looks like a client issue to me, so I'd be glad about any tips how to change it.
If it isn't ... well, then look at the former points.
Lack of focus
Looking at a texture straightly from 90°, the textures look pin sharp. However, looking at them from an angle decreases the focus gradually. Looking at the ground from below it just looks like a big cocktail. Actually, that's not that critical. Unless some really nasty light reflections show up, it even looks quite handsome. However, the clean, white-on-black textures in Downtown, like certain plazas or main roads, show a lot of this problem, f.e. when two yellow, pin sharp trails in the middle of a Downtown road merge into one after a few meters.
Foresight increase
Ever been on the top of the government building? What's supposed to be a breath-taking panorama overview over the whole city is nothing but fuzzy, great silhouetts. I get that when I raise my camera by Hyper-Jump or when I'm just running over a long road. The foresight is definetely too short. Although I would definetely agree with temporal foresight decreases according to weather changes (like fog), I think long-ranged overview is a vital part of any city look.
Sunshine in underground tunnels??
Funnily enough, I didn't receive that for some time. But recently, I happened to run through that long tunnel near Mara central at an especially shiny day. It was just ridiculous how the ground still looked like sun shone on it in its full brightness. I haven't really done any serious investigations about that, I just remember it was purple sky day and the lights above were kinda deactivated.
Of course, in reality, long underground tunnels should be dark as hell all the time. However, we don't need total authentity in this game. I'd say, turn down the brightness there, make it look like the darkest time of sunrises/sunsets and let the lights shine upon the street subtly. That wouldn't completely remove the "day look" of the tunnel, but would also make it more realistic and credible. Of course, nearer to the ends of the tunnel, the sun begins to shine in and the whole thing become brighter again.
SUMMARY:
rrrWhereas the last 3-4 were just ideas to make the graphics look better, the first points are abolutely crucial in my opinion and should be taken care of as soon as possible. Because I think that a great-looking environment at any place at any time is absolutely vital to the game experience.
I mean, for most parts, it's already done. The world has the ability to look absolutely breath-taking and gorgeous, all I'd like to see is the worse parts being cut out until there's time to put more efforts in them.
Again, apart from the information at MxO Archive, I don't know which of these issues can be solved by manipulating the client and which only the server is responsible for and therefore should be requested in posts like this. I mean, I just wanted to complain about the personal spot light and to ask to add an option to deactivate it. And now look at that, I copied a few letters and numbers into a file and it's gone.