Gamma Settings - is this my monitor

[Oldjim]

I spotted this when playing Penny Dreadful which is a dark mission and I couldn't see the ghouls without increasing the gamma level from the default to the point where I can just see the smallest number which was almost the maximum gamma setting and makes the other missions look very odd

I took a picture of the settings

This is the default

This is with maximum gamma

Is this as designed or is it my monitor which can't cope with the gamma range properly

[Xarg]

Are you adjusting the gamma in the game, in your video card software control panel, or on the physical monitor itself?

[Oldjim]

In the game

[Xarg]

Hm, I haven't tried Penny Dreadful yet.. do any other missions come up so dark for you? It's possible the map just has a really low ambient light value.

[Oldjim]

I think it is only that mission but after a bit more digging and looking at gamma test charts on the web - it is my crappy monitor which has a very poor differentiation between white to black once you get into the middle grey bands

Perhaps time to look for a better monitor as it is over 6 years old

Edited October 21, 2013 by Oldjim

[Serpentine]

Yeah, its a problem when mappers have good monitors (or ones with a very low black point). They are often able to easily see things with the lights down very low, while others might struggle.It's neither party's fault, merely a reminder of how much nicer dark games look on old CRTs

 

Some of this is also down to how course the ambient lighting level range is. If you average out the RGB value of the ambient light, each of which are on a scale of 0-255, you end up with something like 12 on a normal mission. Increasing this to something like 24 and it looks like a well lit room. So when you drop that 12 down to something like 8, it might look great on my fancy panels here, but it could cause your monitor to be so dark that it starts to clip the black point, or at the very least wash out a lot of darker details.

 

There are a few tradeoffs that can be made to help, specially in outdoor areas. A mapper might bias the ambient a little more in the green channel, which is the best for your eyes to pick up on variations in, but tricky to make look ok, or the easier road is using blue, which has the added benefit of looking like moonlight.

 

At the end of the day, a good monitor is always going to help. Annoyingly however the nice cheaper eIPS panels do not have a full set of polarising filters, leading to some 'ips glow' in the corners. That said, Samsung do offer some other tech which gets very low black levels, but are very tricky to find. Splurging on monitors/headphones/keyboards, when its quality over gimmicks, is always a little more acceptable

[Oldjim]

To finish - after a bit of fiddling with the monitor settings and the in game settings I now have a reasonable compromise which works in Penny Dreadful as well as the other games

[simplen00b]

Penny Dreadful was particularly dark, IIRC - had to use my lamp at times (which I very rarely do).

 

I was under the impression the low ambient light was a deliberate design choice by Melan, but could be wrong.