
Recoil is simply the term that describes how the gun pulls back as it is being fired. This is often utilized as a technique to try and hit more people, using a larger or more powerful gun to simply haphazardly spray into a wide area-like, as I said, the blooming of a flower. It refers specifically to the area that your bullets hit as the gun recoils and sprays bullets around. Well, as I touched on, it’s to do with the spray and recoil of a gun in a shooter game, whether an FPS or a third-person shooter. So, what is this other sense of the term bloom? Games now have pre-built systems which can simulate the finest minutiae of the way light behaves in a real environment.ĭevelopers mostly just employ these techniques to create the effect.Īs I said, there’s no necessity to have a bloom effect in your game to have good visuals, but it can certainly spice things up. It boils down to just adding a glowing effect that radiates light sources in the game. This is naturally a highly technical question to answer, but let’s look at the broad brush strokes of it. The other sense of the term comes from the idea of a blooming flower-since it describes the recoil area of effect of a gun, it blooms outwards like a flower. Since then, bloom has been an industry standard term for how graphical lighting works in your game. This has been in use in gaming for decades, with the earliest games to use the effect including Riven from way back in 1997, Outcast from 1999, and other games of that era. It refers to the act of coating a lens in a special surface layer so that reflections from its surface are actually reduced.īloom is certainly a term that came out of the gaming industry itself, as opposed to being coined and popularized by gamers themselves.ĭevelopers use this term to describe the graphical effect they are trying to achieve, and it has now become the industry standard. I’ll get into that later, but for now just rest assured that usually when people are talking about bloom in a general sense, they are referring to the graphical feature and not the other meaning.īloom is a term that has been in use in photography and videography for a long time. While these things are by no means required to produce a good-looking game, they are to a degree the standard now at least in the AAA industry.īloom can have a completely different sense related to the firing of weapons, particularly guns, in video games. You also will not get that sense that you’re looking through an actual camera lens.

With bloom turned off, lighting will be flatter, and surfaces not be as highly reflective. With bloom turned on, you’ll see greater reflections, and the light source itself will seem to dissipate further. Look at a source of light in the game, whether that’s the sun or just a light in the ceiling. Its basic aim is to reproduce the kind of effects you get from real-world cameras, in the way that light seems to grow and reflect more because it is reflecting off the lens.īloom is usually a graphical option that you can turn on and off in video games, and this is the easiest way to see for yourself what the difference is.

Bloom can stand for a couple of different things in gaming, but it most often is a graphical matter.īloom is a particular kind of graphical effect that is designed to replicate the way that light reflects off and interacts with surfaces.
