AH2 brightness levels. Messed up?

[Krusty]

This might take a couple paragraphs to explain, so I'll make it short and if I miss something will fill in with a reply.

In AH1 we didn't have a gamma setting. The colors were richer, more distinct (for me, explained below keep reading). Using the same system that ran AH1, AH2 was literally like flying at night. I could NOT see the world at all. Gamma was at 1.0 by default. Something was amis. Okay, so basically I had to go in and up gamma. Up gamma. Up gamma. Now to get it to look like normal daytime, my gamma is at a whopping/freaking/astounding 1.8.

Now my colors look like crap. I can't use default green for a color because I just can't see the color at all against the sky. I've had to go with a sickly color of yellow. Too dark and it's too hard to see against the super bright sky. Too light and it blends in.

For a long time I forgot about setting my gamma to 1.8 and I was really upset with the way AH2 was displaying colors. THEN I stumbled across the gamma settings and the memories came back.

Okay, the problem isn't the colors. The problem isn't the gamma. The problem is that with gamma at NORMAL it looks like midnight.

So basically it's a long story saying that, in order to get this game to a point where I can SEE, I have to jack up the gamma way high and make things look like CRAP.

I recall 2 others having the same problem (waaaaaaaaay back when I first set my gamma, then I forgot about it while trying to learn AH2).

So what's the deal with the dark levels?

System specs:
P3 650MHz
320MB RAM
SB Audigy (previously SB Live! - no difference in performance)
Ge4 4400Ti 128MB (previously Ge256 DDR 32MB)


It is the same on 2 different vid cards. One was there during AH1 and until a couple of months ago. The other card was a newer Ge4 Ti4400, which I use today. Exact same color issues. It's not my system. Almost everything else runs great. Jedi Knight: Outcast I had to tweak a little over default (maybe 5%). Alien Vs. Predator I had to tweak a noticable amount, but that's a really dark game. Counterstrike is good at internal levels (no need to tweak system, just tweak internal game settings) but I had to boost it some. Half-life wasn't so bad. Half-Life 2 demo was nearly unplayable. Even with internal HL2 settings maxed out, I couldn't even see the boxes on the gamma slider. Had to go to system card settings and jack gamma way up then go back into the game.

It SEEMS to me that the newer games are just getting darker. WHY? The same system that displayed older games properly -- it still shows the same levels of bright in the monitor, in images, in everything -- just doens't display the newer games. INCLUDING AH2!

So it all ties into AH2. Those other games were examples of what's happening.

I know for a fact it's not some sort of burnout or color loss. It's quite obvious that isn't the case. However the between AH1 and AH2 there was such a drop in light level that it is indirectly ruining my fun.

Need comments on the matter. Ideas. Reasons. Tech gurus welcomed.

[Krusty]

Also have seen lots of screenshots that do NOT use green. One changed it to black because it was hard to see. One to white (to me that's harder to see) and some to other colors. I surmise that similar reasons are at work. People have to up gamma and just can't see the green, so they change it.

[Skuzzy]

Just as a comment.  Most people will not have any issues with brightness of the game.  I say that as I know the older NVidia cards had terrible DAC's which made most games much darker than they were intended to be.

We really have limited access, as most games do, to how bright it appears on your screen.  Games that are 'brighter' probably have special profiles coded for them in the NVidia drivers.

Bottomline is we have no real control over the brightness of the screen.  The difference betwen AH1 and AH2 is AH2 uses DirectX9 and AH1 did not.

I have no idea what your second comment is about.  Personal preferences are just those.  There are a fair number of pastel color-blind people and the change to give a better contrast against a green background wouldbe natural.
I am pastel color-blind, but mine is in the red spectrum, so my screenshots have no red in them, as I turn the enemy to blue/purple.


We cannot change something we have no control over.  The drivers and hardware do all that.

[Skuzzy]

By the way, you can see a shining example of this at an AH Convention.  Every monitor looks different.  Brightness, contrast, even color saturation are all different from player to player, even though we send exactly the same information to every video subsystem.

Personally, I cannot tell any difference in the brightness from Aces High I to Aces High II.

[Krusty]

Skuzzy you may have hit the nail on the head....


DX9. HL2 uses it as well, and it was just as dark (if not darker) than AH2 with 1.0 gamma is.

The older games don't use DX9 and as such don't have the color/brightness problems.

Do you have any idea what the technical side of DX9 does that makes things appear so ... so... "differently"?