Brightness scale

[Irenices]

Could someone give me some tips on how i should be reading the brightness scale in the options, i just got a new monitor a while ago and every time i play i feel like i make the game to bright to where i feel like im not even in the darkness or so dark that i cant see anything, i did the whole tutorial level part on adjusting it but i just cant get a brightness level that makes me happy.

 

Thanks

[Springheel]

There is a gamma room in the training mission to help you set your brightness and gamma levels.

[Fidcal]

Sounds like your contrast is too high possibly? What is confusing is that doom3's 'bright' seems to adjust contrast and 'gamma' boosts mid-range bright. I'd first certainly try raising your gamma a little and lowering the bright in the gamma room. And certainly sacrifice the readable for the room. That is, if you can't get them both perfect then the game world is more important than the readable.

 

The only other thing I can think of is that when I adjusted my own system I found my monitor and graphics card settings made a big difference. I was concerned my Windows desktop would then be wrong but when I kept tweaking those and when I finally got the game OK then I found my Windows desktop was OK too.

 

If it really is the scale that seems too extreme remember you can move the slider using the arrow keys for fine tuning as well as the mouse.

[STiFU]

Bright places too bright and dark places too dark? That's what gamma is for. Lower the brightness so that the bright places don't make you blind. After that you raise the gamma, which maintains your maximum brightnessvalue, but will make the dark places brighter.

 

Also note that mappers may setup different brightness levels in their map. I wouldn't care for the brightnessadjustment room too much for that reason. So if you feel like a map is too dark, just raise r_gamma via console a little.

 

So new monitor eh? If you're coming from CRT to LCD, I'd like to say that most low- to mid-range LC displays have a pretty low contrast on dark imagery, partly due to the backlight inducing halos around the borders of the screen. So that might be the reason why you feel like you can't configure it right...

[Serpentine]

Aaaand if you have bloom enabled, disable it. I found a lot of light sources etc look far too bright with it.

[STiFU]

...or just configure it to your personal needs using the r_bloom* commands so that they aren't too bright anymore, but just create a smooth glow extending over the map geometry! Raising r_bloom_bluriterations especially creates some nice visuals, but also costs a lot of performance if you raise it too high.

[Irenices]

Well i fooled around with it a bunch more and iv gotten it just right i think, thanks for the suggestions guys.

 

On a side note from looking at screenshots iv seen other people post i think i like it ALOT darker than alot of people lol.

[STiFU]

Most people simply raise the gamma on screenshots afterwards, so that the viewers can see everything better.

[New Horizon]

Yes, screen shots are almost always brightened afterward. You shouldn't be basing your ingame experience on those. They're just doctored to let people see the details better.

[Cadex]

I found some brightness/gamma settings I'm happy with that look fine on all the missions I've played, however...

 

I tried nearly every setting possible and couldn't succeed at the gamma room. If I turned it up high enough to see the text on the middle wall even very faintly, it would make everything else too bright (no shadows in the gamma room itself). It's not a big deal though... well, at least until someone makes a mission where you have to peer through a window to read text on a dark wall.

[Fidcal]

There is a big difference between monitors and monitor settings; how well they distinguish blacks. Some even have a blacks adjuster. But on any monitor, if contrast is turned up a little high then this boosts the brights and lowers the darks so the lowest level of dark greys ('blacks') will merge into one. Monitor contrast literally increases the contrast between brights and darks so if it could go far enough then you would only have one bright and one dark and everything below 50% bright would be black and everything above would be bright white.I can only suggest you reduce your monitor contrast slightly while looking at that text. I went back and re-adjusted and tweaked quite a few times until I got it right. My Windows desktop was just fine after that - in fact better. I think we found a website with a monitor test and i re-adjusted again after that. The most important thing imo is if you crouch in that room and can just see a little detail on that dark floor. That should mean in any dark room you can see enough detail to 'make sense' of your environment. It sounds like you are close to that.