Weird look of planets on my laptop [SOLVED]

[Zireael]

Planets look all weird on my laptop (black with a violet halo) and everything is very very dark. I made a screenshot, but I can't figure out how to put it here.

Latest trunk. However, the darkness problems were earlier, I just forgot to report. Shaders set to full. IIRC, different shader settings did nothing to help.

My video card is AMD Radeon HD 6630 M, certainly shader capable. I can run Gothic 3 and other games hard on video card just fine.
My other card is Intel HD 3000, however, I set Oolite to use the better card.

Once again, I beg for a gamma adjustment to be introduced into Oolite.

[Capt. Murphy]

Bit like in this post?

https://bb.oolite.space/viewtopic.ph ... 80#p168281

It's the partially finished new planets texturing code being tested in trunk. Trunk is not as safe a place for general play as it was prior to 1.76...

[Zireael]

A bit, but displaced - the halo is to the side and I can see the dark outline of the planet. And, in my game, the colors are inverted - 'tis the planet which is almost black and the halo is colorful.

I can live with it, though.

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The main problem is below this line.

Everything, and I mean everything (aside from the text in F5-F8 and the scanner and the HUD) suffers from the problem called 'being too dark, nearly black'.

Gamma settings, please!!!

[another_commander]

Gamma settings, please!!!

While waiting for one of the coders to allocate some time for writing the gamma settings thingy some time in the future, why don't you try adjusting it using your graphics card's driver settings? I'm pretty sure all of the newer drivers have a gamma ramp control.

[SandJ]

Once again, I beg for a gamma adjustment to be introduced into Oolite.

On three PCs I have on which I have played Oolite, I have to set the gamma so high that other applications are almost or completely unusable. I was told is is down to using cheap monitors that are good enough for office applications but do not have enough contrast for Oolite. I agree it is tiresome when you have to find the driver, go to the settings, fire up Oolite, launch, face the sun, go back to the gamma settings, fiddle with it until Oolite looks right (although I have now learned what is acceptable), then back to Oolite, re-start the game, then put the settings back after playing. It is probably worth telling new players they'll need to do this when they start playing the game - I didn't know there were any nebulae for months!

[another_commander]

I had a quick look at the gamma situation and the news are quite bad I'm afraid. The version of SDL we are using for Oolite (1.2.13) on Win32 crashes when attempting to set the gamma (i.e. not an Oolite issue, but an SDL issue). The fix is to either upgrade to newer SDL library or backport the fix that was applied for gamma in later versions of SDL to the one we use here. In any case, a new SDL.dll will have to be built before gamma support makes it into Oolite.

[Diziet Sma]

In the meantime, the Catalyst Control Centre's Profile Manager will let you save multiple profiles.. so you could do what I do on my laptop, and set up a "normal" profile, and a profile for Oolite with the gamma the way you want it, then just switch them when you want to play..

The profile manager also lets you assign hotkeys to profiles, so I just go Ctrl-Alt-Shift-O for Oolite, and Ctrl-Alt-Shift-N to go back to normal.

[Zireael]

Thanks for the tip. Seem to have helped a little bit. At least, I can play.

Will bide my time waiting for gamma settings to be introduced in the future (at least it's possible!)

@ another_commander: From a person who knows nothing about programming, I guess upgrading SDL.dll would be easier than trying to backport a fix...

EDIT: Nvm. Capt. Murphy just informed me that gamma settings will be in the next trunk, so I'll grab it tomorrow and test it!!!

[Zireael]

Solved.

The gamma slider works fine. A small adjustment (from 1.0 to 1.4) was enough to make everything perfectly visible!!!