Archived decision board from HIGH WATER (2026). Picked: Night vision comes online after the blackout. The palette became a setting: Bone (the default, Jonas's favourite), Phosphor and Green. ← back to the archive
Opticals · A1 blackout · Bone is the default

Blackout, then the optics come online

Jonas: "dude blackout with a cool effect and then night vision coming online for the player perspective would be soo sick". These are captures from the game on Floor 70 (the KETSU fight, played by the scripted pad), with the power cut by the debug trigger and restored four seconds later. The HUD, tells and objective brackets are live. The boot text is placeholder copy.

The sequence (about 1.6 s)

  1. The riser dies. The lamps go out outward from the break, each tube stuttering off and turning to dead glass. A soft dark front rides the same way across the view, and the floor's ambient falls with it.
  2. Five frames of near-black (the DOOM / Raid beat).
  3. Emergency red. The Stage's emergency light (on the UPS circuit) comes up on the black beat, with the tubes around it glowing red. The sun through the windows becomes the key light.
  4. High Water's optics boot. A collapse line opens (CRT-style), a sweep runs down the frame, and the grade comes up under OPTICS // LOW-LIGHT (placeholder). The Vermin fumble out phones and torches: small pale glows that the optics flare. Hitlag makes lookouts blind in the dark.
  5. Power back. The lamps return and the optics hand back through a short overexposure.

In the game: the real blackouts

These are the floors' own triggers, going through Sim's power graph rather than a debug emit. On Floor 70, Stage._black_out(the booth) runs when the collector's booth drops. On Floor 71, the PV core breaks. The look follows Sim.floor_dark_changed, the floor's main lighting as a whole. A local circuit, such as training's services, only stutters its own lamps out, with no optics. The lit props (vending, washers, pachinko, turnstiles and the rest) are on the floor circuit and go dark with the lamps. The palette is Bone, the new default.

Floor 70 · the booth drops

Floor 71 · the PV core breaks (the first frame is the core's own impact flash)

The palette is a setting

Jonas: bone first, green second, phosphor as the vision. It is now Options · Night vision: Bone / Phosphor / Green, with Bone as the default. Each option shows a swatch of its ramp, and ?optics=phosphor|bone|green still overrides it for QA. After the jam it moves to the operative's loadout page.

The three palettes

The readability rule

Night vision desaturates the world, never the rules:

Cost

WhatWhereResult
The pass alone (the blackout held, the pass toggled)Web, threaded build, 2560×1440, world 640×360, Playwright on the RTX 3070frame mean 13.02 → 13.16 ms (+0.14), p95 16.04 → 16.67 ms
The whole blackout state against power onthe samemean +0.8 to +1.0 ms over two runs; p95 is noisy on the shared machine (16.7–20.4 ms with the power on)
World view GPU time with the passdesktop, Compatibility renderer, 2560×14210.37 → 0.51 ms (+0.14)