objects in the distance fades to white

[Американский Шпион]

distant objects fades to light grayish fog. the thing is, in the original game objects fades to black instead

BUT

if you do a vid restart on any version, fading will disappear entirelly

[Purkkaviritys]

Well, I can say that you haven't adjusted your gamma and saturation levels properly. You might want to set intensity to 3 and lower brightness to around 70%.

[Американский Шпион]

are you sereously? I have intensity on 1 and brightness on 30-40. I tuned it by comparing original release screenshots and trailers on my crt side by side with the game on lcd so the brightness level would be exatly the same. it can look a little bit dark on your screen, but what you suggests is just too bright.

the first two screenshots was taken from dk 1.0, default settings

here is a shot of your suggestions

anyway it's not involved in the color or disappearing of fog

[Frank Sapone]

I am assuming as much, but make sure you're using a fresh config file. Delete current.cfg and verify the issue.

[Purkkaviritys]

Hmm.. Interesting. On my two LCDs and one CRT the thing I suggest is approx. what it should be. I've also done some comparisons. Intensity of 1 is not a good thing it has to be at least 2 for CRTs and 3 for the LCDs based on my experiences and tests I've done. I've determined that intensity value of 3 on average gives the best results. Also lowering the brightness to 70% isn't exact science. I've usually told people to lower it to between 60 and 75%.

But no matter what your first shots are really really really dark to a point they're almost black like night and e.g. the weapon skin looks completely wrong in them. On your new screenshot the Glock2020 looks more like it should. But I agree that it's slightly brighter than what it should be so you might want to go to 60% or maybe even 50% but I wouldn't go past that.

It's also note worthy that your monitor's colour calibration and other settings affect the result (not much but they do). Even if the images are same the way we see them is going to be different. Usually when I see people talk about Daikatana's graphics they point out how dark the game is. And how it's impossible to see due blackness which is why people crank up the brightness to max value and cause the "white veil" effect. That also ruins the graphics because they don't adjust the intensity properly.

Especially the fog in Daikatana is going to look wrong with those settings. That's why I gave you some safe values (intensity of 3 and 70% brightness) where to work your way towards the correct ones for your monitor.

I have a CRT hooked to my Win98SE machine and it has DK1.0 installed and I just have to use intensity of 3 and 75% on it or the game has distorted colours and fog looks wrong and there are items that look wrong at distance. Which is why in my opinion the default visual settings in Daikatana are completely fubar and shouldn't be used as a guideline to anything.

So this is little of my background to this issue. Your experience may differ and in fact it's highly likely that it does differ. There's also the question of personal taste involved too. Some like slightly darker image. :)

[Knightmare66]

I've gotten very similar bug reports in KMQuake2 after I enabled non-power-of-2 textures. It's most likely a mipmapping bug related to Milkey's OpenGL driver not properly handling mipmapping on NPOT textures, and not in the game itself.

[Американский Шпион]

I agree about monitor settings, and yes, I like more darker image, and I say again, I tuned it by looking mostly on this 99 shots on my crt https://daikatanaprereleasearchive.wordpress.com/portfolio/1999-episode-4/

however, I reinstalled the game now and noticed that after launch the brightness quickly jumped from dark to bright. this was because of auto gamma correction. gl_ignorehwgamma did fixed that, but when I tried to switch it back and forth lately it doesn't shown any differences

I've gotten very similar bug reports in KMQuake2 after I enabled non-power-of-2 textures. It's most likely a mipmapping bug related to Milkey's OpenGL driver not properly handling mipmapping on NPOT textures, and not in the game itself.

so what the correct image should look like? is this causing fog to disappear after vid_restart?

[Knightmare66]

The fog disappearing does look like a bug in the game, yes. But the way the texture fading changed is likely be driver-related.

[Knightmare66]

I just fixed the disappearing fog.

[Purkkaviritys]

I made the point about the disappearing fog in the demo recordings previously. Could that issue be related to this issue?

https://bitbucket.org/DGibson/daikatana-1.3/issues/115/bug-mist-isnt-visible-in-recorded-demos

And great if it's fixed now.

Milkey: Don't forget that the beta screenshots will look different on your monitor than they looked at the monitor of the developer who took those screenshots (especially between different CRTs because age of an monitor affects the image in them considerably). Using them as a point of reference to configure the brightness and intensity makes no sense and will misguide you away from what it probably should look. I used the screenshots they printed into the physical Daikatana retail box for my comparison and they're way way brighter than the screenshots you linked into.

[Knightmare66]

No, it doesn't show up in demos because the svc_effect_notify server command apparently isn't recorded for some reason.

[Американский Шпион]

Purkkaviritys actually, my CRT aged really well, and it's one of thouse that had no issues with too dark images. if I hook it up right now and open an image on both it and my main screen, the only real difference would be much richer and colorful image on CRT. btw, direct screenshots is much accurate than a cover art picture since it's not affected by any means, though printed covers may vary significantly depending on type of print, paper, machine and all the stuff. just see for yourself http://www.mobygames.com/game/john-romeros-daikatana/cover-art

you can even look at Romero playing DK himself while in development https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yy8YThhaAxg with both direct video and screen capturing. it's became clear that original image was much darker.

[Purkkaviritys]

Look... First of all we shouldn't be discussing this here. But let me just say few more things before I wrap this up on my part.

Regardless how well your CRT has aged and what its original colour calibration was it isn't going to show the same thing. Even if it was completely new it would not show you the stuff exactly like "it should look like".

Of course the CRT is going to beat LCD in colour reproduction in most cases. That's why it probably looks "deeper" on CRT. Not to mention the viewing angles and other things.

Digital images made from printed media either by scanning or taking a photo are wildly different in quality and colour tone that the source material because our monitors are going to show us different things, because of the scanners scanned different range of colours and because camera's have different sensors, etc. There's no meaning in using those digital images of covers or the video (which is from a magazine CD I have and YT doesn't show it the same way its on that CD) as point of reference because we're going to see different quality and colour reproduction. There's just too many factors that go into this.

In my honest opinion the professional physical print media is probably the closest approximation we have for what the developers probably intended it to look like. Some of us have the physical box and strategy guide and magazines and stuff. But that's just my take on.

Originally when the game launched Daikatana's graphics were critiqued often for being "colourful salad bowl" or "Vivid mess". The screenshots and stuff are not supposed to be black. Before meeting you I had not met anyone who plays it with intensity of 1 and brightness of 30%. The original game doesn't even allow you to lower than 50% for brightness. That pretty much means that you've gone lower than the original developers ever intended people to even go.

We could talk about this more but I'm not going to after this. I'm just too tired. The main thing is that you think it looks fine. And if you're happy with it then I don't care what it looks like even if it's completely off. ;-)

However please rise the intensity and brightness at least a little when submitting screenshots of bugs and stuff. :|

[Американский Шпион]

Ok, don't be so displeased :c I will make bright and shiny shots. I'm sorry we had to even discuss that.

[Purkkaviritys]

Hey, what's your Steam nickname? Can I add you?

[Американский Шпион]

It's the same. Feel free to do so