Lighting / tone mapping / night light

[Charlie]

Battlescape lighting could be greatly improved, especially regarding night missions.

I use my machine mainly for photography, so I play on a monitor calibrated with a hardware color calibration device. It is adjusted perfectly to my viewing conditions (a dim room). Despite this, it is very difficult to make things out in night missions. What I see doesn't feel like night, it just feels like inadequately lit maps. Both day and night lighting feels flat.

Currently there is only one way of increasing brightness - via the "gamma" slider. This is very crude and the end result is equally poor. It changes the gamma of the whole screen while the game window is in focus (luckily when I Alt+Tab the gamma is returned to normal).

Perhaps if the maps had many lights added, and the game used tone mapping which the user could adjust, this would lead to aesthetically far nicer graphics, and more usable too.
Increasing brightness should not clip already-bright areas (currently that's what happens when you increase "geo ambient lighting") nor should it make gray what should be pure black.

This is what night should look like:
http://cache.daylife.com/imageserve/08D410d0b25Uq/550x.jpg
http://i.ytimg.com/vi/isERClRkwOg/0.jpg
http://www.strategyplanet.com/commandos/images/c2_mission1.jpg
http://projectcerbera.com/gta/2/vedic/magic-4.jpg
http://projectcerbera.com/gta/2/multislayer/eternityhill.jpg

Sadly, this is what night does look like in UFO:AI:
http://i.imgur.com/0GAd0.png

[H-Hour]

How to make maps