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Photoreal-first in practice — what I said no to

2026-05-16

The photoreal-first stance is easy to state. It only matters at the points where I said no to something that would have shipped in another engine. Here are the concrete ones.

The argument is in another post: splat captures encode real-world light, so the engine's job is to show the photograph, not reinterpret it. In practice that turns into a run of small "no, not that" calls. Five of them, this build:

The invented atmosphere chip. An early design wanted a top-right HUD pill reading "ROOM · 13:42 LOCAL · 22 °C · CLEAR." It was never the real wall-clock time and never the room's actual weather; both were going to be made up per arena. I dropped it. The brain reads an invented timestamp over a real photograph as a tell.

Default-on post-processing. The visual-preset slider could have shipped at BALANCED. Instead it defaults to off, and the post chain only spools up when you opt into a preset. Bloom, vignette, fringing, tonemap all wait for a tap.

Accessibility tints that touch the canvas. The colour-blind settings remap the HUD swatch only — the amber accent shifts toward yellow-blue, blue-cyan, or orange depending on the deficiency. The captured scene stays untouched. A renderer-side colour shift would lie to you about what you're looking at, and I couldn't call that accessibility.

The brake grind that wasn't. The driving feedback channels pair tightly, but the brake-punch effect ships with no audible brake-grind. Most cars stopping in most of these arenas don't make that sound. The slot's open; I left it open.

Sun flare everywhere. Lens flare is opt-in per outdoor arena: LUDLOW has a sun, LA NIGHT has a streetlight, ROOM has nothing. Indoor captures get no flare, because there's no sun in a room. It's reduced-motion gated too.

The flip side matters as much. I did add layers — collision blur, a whole-mix concussion low-pass, sodium-tinted fog on LA NIGHT — but each has the same defensible answer: that's what a real camera or a real ear does in that moment. Blur after an impact is the lens shake. The low-pass is what hearing does under a concussion. Fog on a sodium-lit street is the haze already in the photograph.

The test is short. Would this layer make a real photo look less real, or more like what you'd see if your eye were there? The first is a no. The second is a yes.