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[Ness Kain]

I work on a Dell Studio laptop, and it seems to have an extremely bright screen by default. I've already turned down the brightness once (to -20) in the ATI control center thing, but that still might not be enough.

I'm currently working on a project that involves a lot of dark, grayscale pixel art... And it's possible that it looks OK on my computer, but is hard for other people to see. Later I might be able to borrow some other computers to see how my stuff looks on them... But for now, could I have some examples so I can adjust my monitor until they look right?
I would prefer to have something similar to what I'm trying to produce... So slightly scaled-up pixel art would be good, and it should be dark, but definitely visible... I think limited colors (grayscale especially) would be the most helpful.

Also, if anybody has a similar computer, it would be nice to know how you have it set up currently.

[Derakon]

Monitor gamma settings are going to be weird from one computer to another pretty much no matter what. One thing I've noticed, for example, is that Macs tend to have consistently brighter screens than Windows computers do (they ship with lower gamma settings). So I don't know what to tell you here except that you should probably consider including a brightness knob in your game's configuration screen.

[Ness Kain]

That's totally beyond my programming skill, I'm afraid.

[jwk5]

The problem is even if you properly set up your display that doesn't mean the people who play your game will have theirs properly set up. The best I can recommend is to create a sort of "brightness calibration screen" for your game, where you have an image on screen and you instruct the viewer to adjust their brightness settings until certain shades are no longer visible (for example). This way you don't have to guess what everyone's display settings will be, you can have them adjust their settings to the ideal viewing experience you have in mind.

One of these kind of setups:

[Dugan]

jwk5's idea is good, lots of `dark` games tend to do this (survival horror for example).

As other folks have rightly said you can't account for everyone's various monitors/settings - but ideally you at least want your screen you work on to be set-up as best as possible.


This site has some setup tests:

http://www.lagom.nl/lcd-test/black.php

a good basic is to at least have your greyscales range going in even steps from black to white (see contrast page).

[Ness Kain]

Interesting... OK, that's an idea.
It's odd, though, because I was thinking my screen was impractically bright, but according to that test, it was actually far too dark...?

[Dugan]

Interesting... OK, that's an idea.
It's odd, though, because I was thinking my screen was impractically bright, but according to that test, it was actually far too dark...?

sorry - use this link -
http://www.lagom.nl/lcd-test/contrast.php
 7th gradient down - the grey one.

[agj]

Calibrate your gamma using this tool: http://www.quickgamma.de/indexen.html

It's not ideal for LCDs, but it'll have to do.

[J.W. Hendricks]

Turn on your bedroom lights very bright, then the computer screen won't appear so bright.

[TeeGee]

Or just - umm - adjust the brightness using...





Ocasionally lower the brightness to minimum and check if the game's still playable. It should give you some idea on how it will looks on a darker screen.