Gamma correction not doing anything

[JoeyBFromKT]

Hi guys,

Downloaded OpenMW for Windows on Saturday. Things are running great but when I adjust the gamma on the in-game video settings, the brightness doesn't change at all. Anyone know what might be the issue? My monitor is calibrated normally and works fine for everything else.

All the best,

J

[Time4Tea]

Where is gamma? I don't see an in-game gamma setting (I'm on Linux, but I thought the options menu was the same as Windows).

[AnyOldName3]

We use the same hack as Morrowind.exe (and a lot of other games from before 2010) to set the gamma, which is to change it for the whole OS while the game is running. Obviously this is awful, so most Linux distros stopped you doing that a few years ago (and we disabled the slider on Linux in response), and Microsoft announced that Windows would stop supporting it soon a couple of years ago, too. I guess that day has come and that's why it's not working for you any more. It'll probably not work in the original engine either now.

[CMAugust]

How trivial would it be to implement an actually sane brightness solution, as in "modern" titles?

[AnyOldName3]

It'll be trivial once we have a post-processing framework, and painful beforehand.

[CMAugust]

I expect the development of post-processing framework will be painful too...

[JoeyBFromKT]

Thanks for the replies guys, genuinely much appreciated and it's great to see such an active community on an old game. Morrowind is making my quarantine significantly more bearable.

I take it from the feedback that it isn't possible to adjust the brightness of the game.

It's not game-breaking, but I'm colourblind and struggle with some of the darker areas, but it certainly adds to the atmosphere! I may have to make do with a light spell or something, or just ratchet up my monitor contrast when I play.

Cheers,

J

[AnyOldName3]

If you're okay meddling a little yourself, you could open the terrain, object and water fragment shader files in a text editor and add

Code: Select all

gl_FragData[0].rgb = pow(gl_FragData[0].rgb, 0.45);

as the last line in the main method (pretty much right before the last } character). This should make things significantly brighter. You can adjust the 0.45 - higher values will make things darker, with 1.0 being the point where you get the original colour. If you want to play around, you might be able to figure out how to do different things for different channels if that helps more.

[psi29a]

Could we use this as a basis for a hacky (temporary) gamma slider?

[AnyOldName3]

Not with my approval.