Nameless Voice on 20/5/2007 at 07:35

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I was just demonstrating the difference that toggle_dithering would have if it worked, which I think it won't on the 8800.

Personally, I have never had trouble seeing dark screenshots. Admittedly, this LCD is set quite bright (screenshots are brighter than ingame, where I have the gamma turned down), but even when I used a CRT, I never had any trouble seeing dark shots.
Even with the brightness here turned all the way down, I can still see them fine...

Also, when I was using the CRT, with a Geforce 4 ti4200, I always played at default gamma and could see things just fine. I once played Thief on an old nVidia TNT2, though, and it was so dark I could haardly see anything - which leads me to believe that certain cheap nVidia cards can't do darks properly.

smithpd on 20/5/2007 at 17:06

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I am trying to stay on topic, but I can't resist.

Since NV does not seem inclined to make his images visible to us, I have done so as a service to the Thief community.

With dithering enabled
http://home.comcast.net/~smithpd1/thief/with_dithering_enabled.jpg

Without dithering enabled
http://home.comcast.net/~smithpd1/thief/without_dithering_enabled.jpg

BTW, these images were both dark and uncorrected. In Hypersnap, I applied gamma +2.02, brightness +7, contrast +7. I also adjusted size to 40% and saved them as JPG's with 90% quality factor.

NV, you should get an image editing program (if you do not already have one) and apply at least gamma 1.8 to your screen posts. That works well for most people. For really dark scenes, a little more tweaking is necessary. I use Hypersnap because I can both take screen shots and edit them in one program. It is quick and easy. Microsoft Photo Editor, which comes free with Office, is also a good bet, but it needs some extra steps.

Back to topic. ;)

Winter Cat and NV, you have found something very important here. I really hope you guys can find a fix to this problem that does not involve running Thief from dromed. That is awkward at best, and it is a little tough for the average user. It would be great if there were some hidden setting in a Thief configuration file or an Nvidia registry setting. Keep pushing.

EDIT1: It is interesting to me that previously, Nvidia drivers prior to 65.xx took care of this problem without the need to run Thief from dromed. Now they do not. Something happened with Nvidia drivers. I am pretty sure it is Nvidia software, not hardware. My reason for this is that using the same hardware, a Ti 4200, I saw the images go from good to bad with just a driver change. I repeat something I said earlier. I do not think this problem is totally unique to the 8800. Maybe the 8800 is worse (I don't have one to check it), but I have been seeing exactly this type of thing for a few years, both on my 6800 GT and my 7950 GT. I call it the dark texture issue. Bad sky is one of the symptoms. The reason why I can't get good images on the 6800 GT and 7950 GT is that the older drivers do not work with the newer hardware. And now we see it again with the 8800. Not surprising.

EDIT2: Perhaps this is obvious to some, but I will say why dithering fixes this. Dithering is applying a pattern of different colors to adjacent pixels to make a color blend. If each individual pixel can display colors in only a coarse way (e.g., 8 bit, 10 bit total range), then with a blend, you can display colors in a much wider range. This trick relies on the fact that if you get far enough away, individual pixel variations disappear. Kind of like four color offset printing.

Without dithering, the video card picks one of the limited colors to display. It is not a faithful reproduction, and not the effect intended by Thief developers.

Thief evidently has a software interface that expects the video card to interpolate in a limited range of possible colors and make a dithered pattern for each color specified by Thief. The video card driver is not doing this correctly and stopped doing it around driver version 56.xx. Apparently Dromed is using a different color interface to the video card. Maybe Dromed does the dithering itself, and sends the dithered pattern to the video card. I suppose the reason for this is performance. Thief probably runs faster on its own than it does if Dromed does the dithering. Does this make sense?

bikerdude on 20/5/2007 at 21:25

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Ok i configured Dromed via imagecfg so that it only uses 1 core...

arse, when I hit shift+: dromed crashes half of the time. And even when I do get it up and running and in game mode via alt+g I onlty get as far as typing toggle into the console and when i trye to to type '_' after the 'e' in toggle dromed crashes... scratch that when i try and type any taffin thing in the console it crashes.... sheesh talke about so far off topic Im out the other side..

any ideas..?

bikerdude on 21/5/2007 at 09:50

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The multimonitor util of choice is 'Ultramon' Amongst other things it allows the setting of the primary monitor on the fly. You can also set primary monitor config per icon shortcut on your desktop, ie. right click, properties of the darkloader icon and set it to load on the second monitor - and YES thief loads on that monitor too...!!!

biker

Freddo on 28/5/2007 at 12:03

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Sucks that NVIDIA (and ATI) removed support for 8-bit palletized textures in their newer drivers. Anyone know of the newer integrated Intel graphic chipsets have the same problem?

A ton of older games from the late 90s have this problem, not just Thief. But also FF7, FF8 and Metal Gear Solid. Hmmm, maybe all Playstation ports do? :P

One way to quickly see if your card support 8-bit palletized textures is by follow these instructions that I found on another website.


I also read that with (http://www.guru3d.com/index.php?page=rivatuner) Rivatuner it's possible to force the system to belive the drivers support 8bit palletized textures, but I can't find it.

Years ago while Windows Vista was in development, I read that they planned on emulating older DirectX APIs so the drivers doesn't have to be backwards compatible. But I belive it was later scrapped? Don't know since I don't have Vista. Or maybe it's still work in progress and something we will see with the next Windows.