Night time way too DARK on ONE machine/hardware

[Laxity]

Is there any way to calibrate the Gamma settings on this game? (i.e. settings to adjust a slider until image is barely visible like in other games)

My friend and I both bought Castle Story recently and at night my friend can't see hardly anything making it near impossible for him to build or do things. On my machine night time is very bright and isn't massively different from daytime so I have no issues wether its day or night.

We are aware that there are lanterns available to build as I have seen in other posts but this isn't the problem. The problem is that night time visibility drasically varies from machine to machine it seems with no way of adjusting this in the settings as far as I can tell.

We have tried fiddling with the monitor contrast/brightness and also forcing Gamma changes in the Nvidia driver control panel which hasn't helped as it just makes black look more grey.

Why is there such a massive differnce between each machine? Clearly this give a competitive advantage so some sort of gamma settings in the game are needed to calibrate it correctly between different hardware.

One system is running Nvidia GTX 780 SLI (Win 7) and the other is running Nvidia GTX 1080 (WIndows 10). Both are running the latest Nvidia drivers available.

Can anyone help please as this is really ruining the game for us!

Thanks!

[Shatojon]

To rule out a system issue, can both of you post a screenshot of night time here? I realise in theory, it should look the same. I just want to make sure the issue is hardware, not software.

[Laxity]

Here are the screenshots taken from both machines in the whilst in the same multiplayer game (so day/night cycle are in-sync):

DARK Win 7 GTX 780 Machine :
=======================

https://imgur.com/zxU7EAX
https://imgur.com/PQbNGzP

LIGHT Win 10 GTX 1080 Machine :
========================

https://imgur.com/LsaFq3k
https://imgur.com/zxU7EAX


Here are the photos of the two monitor screens next to each other (Win7 GTX780 Machine on LEFT, Win10 GTX 1080 on RIGHT)

https://imgur.com/8f5IZPT

https://imgur.com/teVDrVA


The dark screen looks worse to the visible eye than is shown on the camera. Its to the level of hardly being able to see any trees or landscape.

Tried messing with monitor brightness and contrast and gamma settings in Nvidia Control panel but it makes little difference. The GTX 1080 system shows things nice and bright.

All screenshots can be viewed here on one page :

https://imgur.com/a/VVLxx


Thanks.

[Shatojon]

Sorry Laxity, having a hard time catching onto something:

Can you show me a screenshot of night time on the first monitor then a screenshot of nighttime on the second monitor too? Only the night time screenshots for both monitors, no daytime screenshots please :)

[Laxity]

Haha! That's what I mean! ALL screenshots were NIGHT time screenshots and photos. There were NO daytime shots. They were all taken on both machines at the same time during a multiplayer game during night time ONLY!

As you can see there is a significant difference betweent the two machines. The darkest one is far far to dark to the poin of being unable to see walls or Bricktons at night. On the other system there is no problem.

[Shatojon]

Hey Laxity,

Some of those are definitely, 100% day time. At dawn or dusk.

In these two, I can see the lighting on the clouds and the shadows on the ground, they're not during nighttime

https://i.imgur.com/zxU7EAX.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/LsaFq3k.jpg

There's some confusion going on here - is it possible that you were playing multiplayer and the day/night wasn't synchronized somehow (that would be the bug) and that you thought it was?

Better yet, can you go on the machine those two screenshots were from, open the Riverains map on Sandbox, then enable the Debug Panel like so: https://i.imgur.com/mmqgXEz.png

Then in the debug panel (with the game NOT paused), drag the time slider towards the end like so: https://i.imgur.com/waaPvwk.png

Then take a screenshot and post it here (while keeping the debug panel open)

Also, please post a screenshot of your Options > Graphics like so: https://i.imgur.com/VtDCVKI.png

Oh, last but not least (sorry) - the PC specs for the machine experiencing too-bright night time.

Thank you and sorry for the hoops :)

[ThatVideoGameGuy]

It would still be nice to have a gamma slider of some sorts... On my computer it's also impossible to see anything at night. While playing the game my computer looks exactly like the one on the left in the side by side comparison, though the screen shots look fine. Having a slider would allow players to adjust to their liking and easily fix this problem for a variety of hardware/software settings...

[Laxity]

Ok I tried starting two single player games on the Riverains map and enabling debug to set the time to midnight. Both machines then showed more or less the same level of darkness.

https://imgur.com/a/dttVB

So it appears that the problem relates to the day/night cycle not being insync in a multiplayer game as you mentioned as a possibilty.

I think it could be that the machine hosting the multiplayer game time of day is stuck so remains brighter than the joining slave machine which gets very dark.

As ThatVideoGameGuy said I still think there needs to be a gamma slider bar as monitor birghtness and contrast vary drastically between monitor makes. A gamma test screen would be good like in other games (i.e. adjust the slider until an image is barely visible) so that we can be sure we have the correct gamma settings for the game for a particular setup.

Cheers,
Richard.

[Shatojon]

Thanks Laxity,

I'll forward this information to our dev team.