Please bring back the old ambient occlusion!

In 0.25 it's way too heavy on vehicles. There should at least be an option to have the old AO. I'm not sure why anyone would like the dashboard so dark that the gauges are nearly unreadable.

 

ao is certainly a lot stronger with the new update. The moonhawk is quite old, so maybe the 'baked' shadows on the dash, combined with the old dark-textured interior, combined with the new ao is causing problems. For a workaround, have you tried turning on the dashboard lights to see if that helps?

 

The new AO seems very realistic to me. I just care to stick with the new AO rather than the old one.

I guess it helped out, i can read the gauges from the lights turned on.

 

I always play with SSAO off, even before 0.24, to be able to see the analog gauges clearly

 

The problem is not the car. After the update shadows have become much darker. The tunnel in Utah, and trees' shadow in Nordschleife have become much darker. I play with SSAO off, and have the same problem.
We need to adjust Gamma setting

 

I tried resetting the gamma setting as well, but it's not a solution. If you increase it to the point where the interior brightness is sufficient, the outdoor environment becomes over-exposed. With this new AO, there's also unnatural darkness on the ground around tires. It makes the graphics look worse and older.
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How can it be realistic if in real life you'd never have a problem seeing the gauges at daytime.

The new AO looks fine on the environment, but on vehicles it just doesn't look right.
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You're right, even without AO the shadows are now darker. It's more than the AO that the devs changed. I don't like this change at all. The game got uglier.

 

I wouldn't say it's uglier but it's a bit overdone. The shadows were definitely too light but now there are a lot of parts that are not visible.

 

You're right, even without AO the shadows are now darker. It's more than the AO devs changed. I don't like this change at all.

I said uglier because with darker shadows, the shadow edges become more prominent and that shows the roughness. In my screenshot above, see the shadow edge on the driver's door. I don't remember seeing that with the previous graphics. And that's on top of the visibility issues.

To have truly beautiful lighting would require the implementation of global illumination, where light bounces off surfaces and illuminates interior spaces just like in real life. That's why in real life you wouldn't have trouble seeing that dashboard. So absent of that, I'd prefer to go back to the 0.24 graphics.

 

Too light is still way better than too dark. At least you can see your gauges and drive safer.