High Stakes Darkness

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Archived from groups: alt.games.need-for-speed (More info?)

Question: am I the only one for whom High Stakes is very, very dark, no
matter how high I set my system's gamma & brightness from the control panel?
(ie, those have no effect; graphics card is a 32MB ATI Rage 6/Radeon 7200,
by the way, and the rest of my system's an 800MHz VIA C3/Ezra with 128MB
RAM, not that it matters)

http://www.chebucto.ns.ca/~aa343/nfs-hs-shade.jpg - the first tree-canopied
area in Celtic Ruins, as an example; gamma's at 2.00 here. The screen
shot's a bit brighter, actually, than what I see in-game: the tree trunk on
the right side, as a benchmark, is dark enough to be completely invisible!

http://www.chebucto.ns.ca/~aa343/nfs-hs-shade2.jpg - same screenshot, just
with a bit of fiddling in Irfanview to up the gamma well beyond what I can
get in-game to what, I hear, is pretty much how everyone else sees it...

For comparison, http://www.chebucto.ns.ca/~aa43/nfs-hp-shade.jpg (deep in
the Lost Canyons) and http://www.chebucto.ns.ca/~aa343/nfs-hp-shade.jpg
(under an overhang in Aquatica) are pretty much the darkest shaded areas I
can find in Hot Pursuit - with system gamma left at its default levels
instead of jacked up as for the High Stakes shot.

[in every aspect, on my box, Hot Pursuit looks many times better than High
Stakes, though I'm told it should be the other way around... For an example
of how bad High Stakes looks normally, here's the starting line of
the Celtic Ruins: http://www.chebucto.ns.ca/~aa343/nfs-hs-shade3.jpg ]

--
"...there are hardly any excesses of the most crazed psychopath that cannot
easily be duplicated by a normal, kindly family man who just comes into
work every day and has a job to do." [Terry Pratchett, "Small Gods"]
http://www.chebucto.ns.ca/~aa343/index.html

 

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Archived from groups: alt.games.need-for-speed (More info?)

> Question: am I the only one for whom High Stakes is very, very dark, no
> matter how high I set my system's gamma & brightness from the control panel?

Under the games options / graphics / advanced ... there's a gamma adjustment
that should help.

You should also get the spot patch (an update to the directx driver). You
can get it here:

http://jeffareid.net/cgi-bin/spotptch.zip

Use the DX7Z.DLL to replace D3DA.DLL, as it usually looks better. If you plan
on doing any captures with fraps though, DX8Z.DLL runs faster and will work
better with fraps (but the initial movies won't show).

 

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Archived from groups: alt.games.need-for-speed (More info?)

On Wed, 10 Nov 2004, Jeff Reid wrote:
> > Question: am I the only one for whom High Stakes is very, very dark, no
> > matter how high I set my system's gamma & brightness from the control
> > panel?
>
> Under the games options / graphics / advanced ... there's a gamma
> adjustment that should help.

Been there, done that on day 1. Doesn't help... [and I just found out
how dark the game can get - it's pitch-black under the overpass in Durham
Road 'cept for a tiny little bit of sky you can see and the yellow on the
black & yellow striped support under there shows up very faintly; luckily I
tried it out in single mode first - the almost black portion of Adonf
(whatever - 3rd track, first circuit) under the canopy of trees is bad
enough]
Frankly, I'm thinking that there's no hope for me - it just doesn't like
my Radeon 7200, and with only PCI slots it'd be hard to find a decent
card... :/ [note that High Stakes is the only D3D game I've got that behaves
this way - Half-Life, Deus Ex, UT, Hot Pursuit, etc., etc., are all very
pretty and HP, especially, puts HS to shame - at least on my box]

> You should also get the spot patch (an update to the directx driver). You
> can get it here:
>
> http://jeffareid.net/cgi-bin/spotptch.zip
>
> Use the DX7Z.DLL to replace D3DA.DLL, as it usually looks better. If you
> plan on doing any captures with fraps though, DX8Z.DLL runs faster and
> will work better with fraps (but the initial movies won't show).

Fraps annoys me - it somehow gets the brightness/gamma right so that the
screenshots look how they're *supposed* to look in-game.

--
"...there are hardly any excesses of the most crazed psychopath that cannot
easily be duplicated by a normal, kindly family man who just comes into
work every day and has a job to do." [Terry Pratchett, "Small Gods"]
http://www.chebucto.ns.ca/~aa343/index.html

 

[Guest]

Archived from groups: alt.games.need-for-speed (More info?)

>> You should also get the spot patch (an update to the directx driver). You
>> can get it here:
>>
>> http://jeffareid.net/cgi-bin/spotptch.zip
>>
>> Use the DX7Z.DLL to replace D3DA.DLL, as it usually looks better. If you
>> plan on doing any captures with fraps though, DX8Z.DLL runs faster and
>> will work better with fraps (but the initial movies won't show).
>
> Fraps annoys me - it somehow gets the brightness/gamma right so that the
> screenshots look how they're *supposed* to look in-game.

The spot patch doesn't have anything to do with fraps, it just updates
the directx driver from directx3 to directx7.

 

[Guest]

Archived from groups: alt.games.need-for-speed (More info?)

On Wed, 10 Nov 2004, Jeff Reid wrote:
> >> You should also get the spot patch (an update to the directx driver).
> >> You can get it here:
> >>
> >> http://jeffareid.net/cgi-bin/spotptch.zip
<<<snip>>>

Tried it. Correctly identifies my card as a Radeon 7200 instead of
Direct3D Device 1, which is nice.

The DX8Z version slowed everything down and made it choppy and unplayable,
no graphical enhancement. The DX7Z version, on the other hand, gives me
nice, good-looking cockpits (before I was getting an ugly generic dash that
was identical on every car), though not nearly as photo-realistic as they
seem to be in the various screenshots I've seen 'round the 'Net, and an
effect or two that I don't recall being there before (such as smoke from the
chimneys in the Celtic Ruins).

It also solves a problem that's annoyed me, but hadn't mentioned - before,
when exiting HS, 'ddhelp.exe' would crash with an invalid page fault.

Unfortunately, it doesn't do anything for the ultra-dark areas (under the
overpass in Durham road, under the two tree canopied areas in Celtic Ruins,
etc.) that were my main problem. Oh well. The patch *does* make a fairly
large difference, so I *will* be keeping it and you have my thanks...

[wonder if it can be adapted to Hot Pursuit? The graphical superiority
over HS is impossible to deny, even with the patch on the latter, on my box.
Except for one thing: no dashboards at all for me in HP. ]

> > Fraps annoys me - it somehow gets the brightness/gamma right so that
> > the screenshots look how they're *supposed* to look in-game.
>
> The spot patch doesn't have anything to do with fraps, it just updates
> the directx driver from directx3 to directx7.

Yeah, but you mentioned fraps in conjunction with the patch, which gave me
an opportunity to grumble.

--
"...there are hardly any excesses of the most crazed psychopath that cannot
easily be duplicated by a normal, kindly family man who just comes into
work every day and has a job to do." [Terry Pratchett, "Small Gods"]
http://www.chebucto.ns.ca/~aa343/index.html

 

[Guest]

Archived from groups: alt.games.need-for-speed (More info?)

On Wed, 10 Nov 2004, Joseph William Dixon wrote:
> [wonder if it can be adapted to Hot Pursuit? The graphical superiority
> over HS is impossible to deny, even with the patch on the latter, on my
> box. Except for one thing: no dashboards at all for me in HP. ]

Oops! My bad! Didn't know they wouldn't show up in wide-screen mode.
Hmmm. Looks nice, but the wheel moves too unnaturally - not nice and
smoothly rotating as in the patched HS...

--
"...there are hardly any excesses of the most crazed psychopath that cannot
easily be duplicated by a normal, kindly family man who just comes into
work every day and has a job to do." [Terry Pratchett, "Small Gods"]
http://www.chebucto.ns.ca/~aa343/index.html