Alpha Centauri 2

Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri & Alien Crossfire => The Theory of Everything => Topic started by: bvanevery on June 12, 2022, 07:34:29 am

Title: gamma correction big difference
Post by: bvanevery on June 12, 2022, 07:34:29 am

I've never messed with the gamma correction settings before.  It's one of the preferences.  You move this grey square back and forth as a bar above it changes its black to white gradations.  I think the goal is to get the grey square to be next to the same shade on the gradated bar?  Well I tried.

Why did I bother to do this?  Well with this new laptop of mine, everything looked consistently too dark.  I thought it was Microsoft's fault somehow with Windows 11.  There is some kind of "content adaptive brightness control", which I turned off.  But still my game seemed too dark.  So this evening I remembered, hmm, what about gamma correction?

Everything looks so different with higher gamma correction, it's freakin' weird.  Planet is kinda washed out and dusty, more like real life Mars.  Ugly, to be honest.  Trees don't look good either.  I think I've overdone it.

Is 1.00 the default?  That could be what I started with, but there's no "Restore Default" button for gamma correction.  1.00 seems too dark.  1.10 is a bit brighter without the colors getting too lousy.  1.20 starts to look slightly washed out.  1.30 is noticeably washed out.

Gonna try 1.15 for a bit.  Wouldn't it be ironic if the gamma correction process itself, somehow brightened the screen up, not due to gamma correction.  Like what underlying weird API layers is it accessing?

Title: Re: gamma correction big difference
Post by: Geo on June 12, 2022, 10:03:45 am

To answer your primary question, on my end the gamma correction has a value of 1.0.
I never bothered to tinker with it.

Title: Re: gamma correction big difference
Post by: bvanevery on June 12, 2022, 05:52:36 pm

Yeah I just verified that the default is 1.00 by starting a different game installation.