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I've been running into a problem with the navigator after switching to version 1.6.9 where things seem to get darker the more I zoom in until I eventually can't see anything at all. This seems to happen regardless of what I'm trying to look at, since there should be plenty of detail appearing and it's nowhere near far down enough to be some sort of artifact problem. It kind of seems like it's determining the distance from the surface differently and placing too much empty space between the camera position and the surface. All the lighting settings are the same as I was using prior to the update and I've never had a problem before, is this a new glitch or was there some sort of new lighting option added recently that's making it function differently?

As an example, here's what I'm getting when I zoom in on a pretty basic -1.5 scale, .5 min R, 1 fold mandelbox, starting with the main view and then zooming in on the top left corner.

Looks like maybe Dynamic fog is enabled while navigating, closer the Zoom the denser the Fog. Pumping up the Vol on the Light in the Nav doesn't help?

Tried that and the fog settings were already set to 0 all around. Plus the navigator has always shown a simple representation of what the fog effects will look like after a complete render for me, this just feels like a counter-intuitive thing where things are getting farther away the closer I try to look at them. I've switched back to 1.68 since it produces the same quality images and isn't giving me a problem, I'm just curious what would cause it to happen so I can better understand how the program functions.

Hi Fitz,

the initial image has not the default coloring, so it would help if you could post the specific parameters on this one.

It is true that the ambient shadow function has changed a little what gives darker shadows, more contrast.
But that should only lead in some regions towards to dark regions and should vanish on further zoomings.

Beside that, increasing the lighting on the navigator panel, like lenord told, should help in dark regions.
If not, there might be the dynamic fog not really set to 0, or you did not insert the new lighting into the navi...

addon:

The darker shadow function is older than v1.6.8, new in the actual version is that the farplane of the navigator will be set according to the Zend value if you insert the parameter.
So my second guess is that you have a low farplane value and maybe a dark depth color with depth set to bigger than zero or something.
Please update to v1.6.9.1, the Zend value is for this reason bigger if you reset pos&zoom.
And when loading older parameters into the navi, check the farplane value if the background behaves iffy.  It should be like 30 to 200.

Thanks for the help Jesse, though updating from 1.6.9 to 1.6.9.1 seems to have fixed whatever was going on without having to change much. The reason the coloring was off is because I always load up a previously determined parameter so that I start out with the right resolution, calculation and postprocessing effects that I want. I know it wasn't something to do with ambient fog effects, so I'm thinking it was something to do with the way the new zend value was behaving.

Everything is running great now, thanks again for your amazing work on this program.