REQUEST: Gamma adjustment on WinSetup.exe

[Rui 'Trovatore' Pires]

Really, gamma setting is one of those things that every game should have.

But, even though AGS currently has that possibility, no one actually uses it. A shame. And most, if not all, AGS games look extremely dark on my computer - I have my screen set to a low enough gamma not to hurt my eyes. I shiver when I think of the brightness that the games' artists' must set their monitors to.

So I'd like to request - please! - a gamma setting available on the WinSetup thingamajiggy.

[Ghost]

I second that! I can create images that look a nice, gloomy dark to me... yet on my friend's computer they're so much brighter. My monitor's just naturally dark, or maybe it's my video card. A gamma setting would be very, very useful.

[Shane 'ProgZmax' Stevens]

I dunno, gamma adjustments in games have always felt rather unnecessary to me since I can quickly adjust brightness levels of my monitor from my monitor control panel or my video card software (forceware).  It would be an interesting feature but is it something we can't quickly do ourselves with a minimum of effort?  Not really.

[Rui 'Trovatore' Pires]

Well, I have my monitor set up just the way I like it. Going into the NVIDIA Display properties and setting the gamma as necessary (in the process making my desktop painfully bright) *once* isn't too bad. Twice isn't too bad. But doing it every other AGS game, and then having to reset it to the way it was...

Don't tell me you think if it's not annoying once it's not annoying +50 times.

[Scorpiorus]

Interesting idea... One problem, however, is that we won't see a gamma change until the game is started; so it may be somewhat hassling to adjust it that way. Also, just to note, gamma setting doesn't work in windowed mode.

Alternatively, there could probably be an option built in the engine; say two hotkeys to adjust the gamma level, that can be disabled in case game author wants to use the System.Gamma property on their own.

[Ghost]

...we won't see a gamma change until the game is started

Would it be very hard to implement something like this: The game's author can create a picture that displays a typical scene of his game, and the winsetup panel shows that pic AND the gamma effect?
I'm not sure if that would be hard work, but it seems sensible. The author would, of course, need to take some care to chose a suitable screenshot.

[Pumaman]

Hmm, interesting point. That last suggestion would be cool, but probably overkill for this feature. Perhaps just a slider in winsetup to select a gamma level and then you'd have to run the game to try it out?

[Rui 'Trovatore' Pires]

I'd have no qualms with that. Running the game, saving, quitting, changing the gamma level and re-running the game is better than running the game, saving, quitting, fiddling around with my monitor setting and re-running the game.

[Ghost]

Sounds functional enough, I would like to have it.

[GarageGothic]

The setup menu has had so many "features" added by now, that I'd like to request an option NOT to have it open when you run "gamename.exe --setup". I'm writing my own setup program to read/write to the cfg file with only the options that I feel are necessary, plus some extended options that only pertain to my game.

[strazer]

GG, I can understand wanting to replace winsetup.exe, but what if your setup program doesn't run on my machine? Why else would someone manually do gamename.exe --setup anyway? I'm totally against this.

[GarageGothic]

Well, if it doesn't run, then I fucked up - I can't see how that is any different from my scripting making the game crash or using a video codec that your machine doesn't have. On the other hand, I do see your point and I agree, but I do reserve the right to keep my game from running with settings that I don't approve of (such as running a hi-res game in 320x200 or using the Hq2x and Hq3x filters).

The main reason for my previous post is that I think the hardcoded setup menu takes away too much control from the designers. Especially the filters and the (seemingly) higher resolutions they allow along with horrible slowdowns is something that really bothers me. I'm aware that you can disable them in the .cfg file, but if anybody deletes the .cfg the options will be available again. I can just imagine some asshole running a 640x480 game in 960x720 filtered, thinking they will get better graphics and in reality getting 320x200 with gigantic fonts and incredibly poor performance.
I totally agree that games should support gamma settings. But I really think this is up to the designer to implement, just like mouse wheel support, sound volume and any other helpful feature.

[Pumaman]

However, some people have monitors that don't support resolutions like 320x200 and 640x400, in which case the filters can be necessary to get the game to run -- so I wouldn't dismiss them out of hand.

[Rui 'Trovatore' Pires]

I totally agree that games should support gamma settings. But I really think this is up to the designer to implement, just like mouse wheel support, sound volume and any other helpful feature.

Hey, I agree. Thing is, no one's using it. And people won't use it because they have their monitor set up just the way they like it, and in such a way that the images they make there look perfect for the monitor. Most people don't get to see their images on different monitors and systems before they finish the game (and rarely bother to make many changes later).

In the meantime, us people who don't have the monitor as bright/dark as them, and who - like me - prefers to have his window open because it can get quite stuffy in the room and prefers to let sunlight into the room AND has his monitor so that sometimes the sun's reflection makes the images damn near invisible... well, us people moan, especially since nowadays pretty much every game has a gamma slider.

[MrColossal]

I can just imagine some asshole running a 640x480 game in 960x720 filtered, thinking they will get better graphics and in reality getting 320x200 with gigantic fonts and incredibly poor performance.

I have to run my current game which is 320x240 256 colours at 960x720 with 3x nearest neighbor filtering on becaues my monitor doesn't do clean pixels at full screen 320x240. If you disable these options to me I will not enjoy your game as much as I could.

[GarageGothic]

I never said anything about deactivating the nearest neighbour filters. I spoke specificly 1) of using the Hq filters, which modify the intended graphic style and lower performance considerably. And 2) Running the game at a (engine wise) lower resolution than it was designed for, meaning pixelly graphics and - at least in my case - fonts so large that most text boxes overrun and one section of the game crashes due to GetTextWidth routines being invalid.
What bothers me about the filters in particular, is that they are presented as offering higher resolution, which could possibly lead to misunderstandings (one would think that 960x720 looked better than 640x480, right?). I don't really understand why the 320x200 (and scaling thereof) options aren't just greyed out in hi-res games, as they will most likely make the game unplayable and certainly doesn't look anything like the artist meant it to do.

Sorry for bringing the thread off-topic - my original suggestion was meant to allow custom setup programs as an alternative to just complaining that the setup screen is getting a bit crowded with (sometimes unwanted) default features.

[Rui 'Trovatore' Pires]

I often run 320x240 in 640x480, BTW. When I want to multi-task a bit, and want to play the game in windowed mode, 320x240 would be way too small.

Lots of different strokes, for lots of different folks.

[GarageGothic]

Jesus H. Christ, is nobody reading what I actually write? I said that running the game at a LOWER resolution than it was designed for was problematic. Running Lo-res game in high resolution is fine with me, as is running games with the 2x and 3x nearest neighbour filters which don't actually change the visual style of the game.

And to avoid confusion for those who haven't tried the filters: No, running a 640x480 game in 960x720 doesn't mean higher resolution - it means scaling the original graphics down to a 320x240 window, then enlarging THAT window by a factor 3.

[Gilbert]

It depends on how it's implemented.
In some real old versions of AGS you could actually run games in 960 x 600 (which actually used 1024x768 mode and yeah, this feature was removed in later versions), if the game was made in 640x400 the engine used alternate pixel-doubling (nearest neighbour) scaling, which may not be good news for die hard pixel-art fans, but still better than downgrading the game to 320x200 and uses the 3X filters.

In fact we did have some discussions on disabling filters from setup menus, I'm not sure if it's finally implemented though.

About the ability to downgrade games to lower resolutions, I have to agree a bit that this may not be a good thing, but there were some historical reasons to it, as AC was originally intended for low res. games, hi-res support was just like a "hack" to provide a feature to display better graphics (so the game internal coordinate system is still low res), if the engine was designed to handle hi-res at the beginning  game resolutions should not even be able to change (since we can use filters to deal with display issues, etc. anyway) IMO. Also, for another historical reason we did need to downgrade resolutions in the past sometimes, one example was RR1, which was actually made with 960x600 res., but was actually too slow to run in that res. (at that time for my computer at least), so we needed to set it to 640x400.

I think Eric (and possibly some other people) did misundertand a bit on your reasonings (as he just said to run a native 320x240 game in 3X), but I think there's nothing frustrating to be a bit over-reacting.

[Snarky]

The main reason for my previous post is that I think the hardcoded setup menu takes away too much control from the designers. Especially the filters and the (seemingly) higher resolutions they allow along with horrible slowdowns is something that really bothers me. I'm aware that you can disable them in the .cfg file, but if anybody deletes the .cfg the options will be available again. I can just imagine some asshole running a 640x480 game in 960x720 filtered, thinking they will get better graphics and in reality getting 320x200 with gigantic fonts and incredibly poor performance.

Don't you think that anyone who is technically savvy and determined enough to delete the CFG file in order to change these settings will understand this issue, though? Also, even though something is stupid, there might still be reasons to do it. For instance, if you had taken screenshots of your game in the two different modes, maybe people would have understood what you were talking about more easily. I've played around with filters and the different screen modes on a number of different games just to understand what exactly causes slowdowns and what my computer can handle.