Hence the correct colour management pipeline was to have linear RGB textures which then were used by the linear RGB mathematics of the GPU which then get “gamma corrected” for display on the monitor. How WC3 implemented gamma even reflected this since it used the legacy DAC look up tables which are now used for display calibration and hence was incompatible with the OS display calibration feature and why gamma never worked when in windowed mode.Īs for why it never worked properly in the first place… Old video games were meant to use gamma correction to convert from the linear RGB results from the GPU lighting calculations to the gamma response of the monitor being used, something approximating sRGB. This comes from the old days of analogue CRT monitors which could have different gamma curves and hence needed “gamma correction”. Gamma is an exponent value which is used to remap pixel values so that they more correctly appear at their intended intensity levels when displayed on screen. Sure some values of gamma will appear to make the image darker, but that is because they are mapping more component values to lower values.
Gamma cannot really be darkened as it is a scalar value rather than an intensity. The changes will only work inside Warcraft III when playing the map. I think there is currently a limitation that one cannot modify the day/night model used by World Editor. Some MDX to MDL converts do allow one to edit the lights using a text editor, however many will fail to convert properly causing the model to break. One can export an existing one, change it and import it back into the map using the asset manager. Use something like Retera’s model studio to modify the day/night models. Like wise a brightness of 10 would make it look like the sun is swallowing the world with bloom lighting blurring everything together. A brightness of 0.01 will give only the faintest hint of the terrain and make the player rely on placed light sources for any sort of visual clarity or detail, which sounds like what you are after. These custom models allow one to specify the tint as well as light intensity.
To change this one can use custom day/night models, which can be dynamically changed by triggers. The default (can be changed) implementation of night is for game mechanics like healing, mana and sight range rather than to blind players from seeing action clearly. Night is purposely very bright so as to not impact melee gameplay. Are there any other ways to darken the gamma a bit to expose better lightning such as torches and lanterns? Night time currently looks like high noon (they are only using coloration differences for noon/dusk/midnight/dawn but keeping the brightness the same…).