Titanfall - works great, but poor contrast/brightness.

[SpartyCrunch]

I was happily surprised about how fantastically well Titanfall works through Steam in-home streaming. Even on wi-fi there was no perceivable lag, and everything moved at a brisk 60fps at 720p.

The problem though was that contrast/brightness was all screwed up. The brightness was too low, while the contrast was way too high, so it made it nearly impossible to see many important UI elements. The game doesn't look like that on the host PC, and changing settings didn't fix the issues. Changing my TV's output settings also didn't help since the problem was with the picture itself, not how the picture was being displayed.

Any ideas? Perhaps a known issue?


(Note: This was on Saturday the 15th, so I'm not sure if those updates fixed things. I don't see anything in the patch notes which suggests it was though)

[pickled pixels]

I'm also experiencing the same issue. It seems that Steam is applying some mask on top of the stream when Titan Fall is focused -- alt-tabbing outta it transmits picture-perfect frames but tabbing back in only momentarily transmits picture-perfect frames (which shortly after darkens the whole screen, reducing the overall brightness to a consistent darkness). Anyone made any progress on this issue?

[CHARB]

Same here. I found this, tried it but didn't see any difference. It's not related to housestreaming per say, but maybe the whole problem is related to how Titanfall handles color profiles. Maybe something weird happens when it gets the window focus on the client computer. (that's why alt-tabbing out of the game fixes the color, but going back in it makes everything dark again)

http://www.reddit.com/r/titanfall/comments/1y0c9h/titanfall_pc_beta_workaround_for_framerate_cap/

About the colors
Many of you probably noticed that Titanfall has horrible colors, especially if you have your own custom color profile set in Windows, like i have for my VG248QE 144Hz monitor.
TitanFall ignores your color calibration and the only way i have found to fix this is by doing this:
1- Open Origin, then go to your Game Library, hover your mouse over Titanfall and click on the i
2- Open Game Properties and add the following commands -novid -noborder , this will disable the intro logos and it will enable borderless windowed mode
3- Launch TitanFall and in the Video Options set your game to Run in a Window
4- Restart Titanfall
5- Go back to Video Options and enable Full Screen, your windows color calibration should now be kept and you will notice much better colors
You will have to repeat this process every time, so before you exit the game make sure to set it to Run in a Window then each time you open it, set it to Full Screen
This has certainly improved my Titanfall Beta experience and i hope it will help you as well

Let me know if any of this worked for you.

[pickled pixels]

Thanks for the reply. I will try this out soon.

I assumed it was Steam applying the mask because I've streamed while still using the monitor (read: TV) -- this way my gaming doesn't monopolize the TV -- and the color quality is different than the streamed feed on my laptop. The in-game video settings does affect the monitor but not the streamed feed.

EDIT:

I've tried switching the video options and setting the game properties on the host's Steam and Origin entries to no avail.

However, I did noticed something: if I stream Wordpad, minimize it and start Titanfall through Origin then there the color quality is actually appropriate -- however, I get like 20 FPS instead of the usual ~60.

EDIT: Now, I might be going a bit crazy but I think it's the Steam Overlay (although it's been disabled on both the client and host machines). When I'm streaming Wordpad => Titanfall, the Steam Overlay is not available. However, when I stream Titanfall directly, it's available and the screen goes darker just as the bottom-right notification pops up.

EDIT: Confirmed. Renaming GameOverlayUI to anything else (so it's not found when you kill the process or start a game) on the host machine while Steam is running and then streaming Titanfall directly doesn't exhibit the bad color quality. But it seems to have broken fullscreen on the Titanfall stream (still works on the host machine's monitor).