Description: The original Infinity Engine games provided options to adjust brightness and contrast which helped a lot, especially in dark dungeons or at night time. Unfortunately these options have been removed from the Enhanced Editions of the games.
This mod provides a way to bring back the means to adjust brightness, contrast and gamma correction. You can choose from a set of predefined lighting configurations or enter the desired values manually.
Since version 3.0 of the mod you can also adjust color temperature as well as hue, saturation and lightness. The latter set of options has been marked as "Advanced Settings" as they are useful only in specific cases.
Note: Changes made by this mod will not be visible if you select "Alternative renderer" in the graphics options of the games.
Hey @argent77, this mod is great! I've noticed on problem though, any settings, even the game's default (1, 0, 1 entered via 22, iirc) result in the red overlay showing damage to a character to be rendered at essentially black. Could you look into this? It's the only thing keeping me from using, as it looks like my characters' portraits are blacked out when they take damage.
@argent77 When manually entering the brightness, the installer rejects ".03" and to get it to accept the value I have to enter 0.03. Not sure if that's something you can fix or not, but FYI.
I'm using a strict format check for entered values to make sure that they don't cause syntax error in the shader script files. Tbh, I've never tried out whether GLSL accepts floating point values without decimal part, but it seems to work. I'll fix it in the next release.
And my question: In the instructions you say that one of the files is used for map background. What is map background?
It's basically the tileset of the map (i.e. the static background as well as water/lava overlays). Dynamic stuff such as creatures, visual effects or animations are not affected by this file.
I have tried to modify the lighting of the map background, but it doesn't work for me. I tried several values in the fpseam.glsl file, but they don't change how the game looks:
No, I haven't enabled the alternate renderer. Anyway, it looks like it's a problem of mod compatibility, because I have several mods installed. I just tried your mod with a clean installation and it works. I've also had some other minor issues with the other mods, so it's probably best to remove and reinstall everything. Thank you anyway.
Amazing stuff. Now my light spot-enabled projectiles will actually show. Yes, argent? Increasing contrast will bring more shadows and bring out glows? And by the way, what about saturation? I may want to increase contrast, but that always requires toning down saturation. It would especially in SoD, where many areas are acidic-colored as they are.
I found some promising shader-specific code examples about color space conversions, so saturation (as well as hue and lightness) won't be a real problem. I also stumbled across an interesting article about calculating color temperature. Maybe I can implement that too.
No, I haven't enabled the alternate renderer. Anyway, it looks like it's a problem of mod compatibility, because I have several mods installed. I just tried your mod with a clean installation and it works. I've also had some other minor issues with the other mods, so it's probably best to remove and reinstall everything. Thank you anyway.
I finally reinstalled everything, and I still have the same problem. The general lighting adjustments work well, but the background adjustments in the file fpseam.glsl don't work, so it looks like it's a problem of mod compatibility. The mods I have installed are Ascension, Tweaks Anthology, SCS, Portraits Everywhere, Jimfix and EE UI Tweaks. Any idea of what might be causing the problem?
A quick check revealed that fpseam.glsl is identical to the patched file from a clean installation. I'll try to recreate your mod setup to see if it triggers this issue.
In the meantime could you check if there is a second instance of this file in one of the following directories, which could override your patched file?
Documents/Baldur's Gate II - Enhanced Edition/Characters
Documents/Baldur's Gate II - Enhanced Edition/Movies
Documents/Baldur's Gate II - Enhanced Edition/Override
Documents/Baldur's Gate II - Enhanced Edition/Portraits
Documents/Baldur's Gate II - Enhanced Edition/Scripts
Documents/Baldur's Gate II - Enhanced Edition/Sounds
GAME/lang/xx_YY/Movies
GAME/lang/xx_YY/Override
GAME/lang/xx_YY/Sounds
GAME/Characters
GAME/Movies
GAME/Portraits
GAME/Scripts
GAME/Sounds
where xx_YY is the language code of your selected game language.
I couldn't find anything wrong with the map background lighting after recreating your mod configuration. There must be something else on your system that interferes with this particular shader file.
I reinstalled everything again and this time it worked. The only difference I'm aware of is the installation order, this time I installed the lighting pack a bit earlier. I attach the Weidu log in case it's useful.
Now that I've managed to adjust the gamma of the background I've found a minor issue with the character markers. I describe the issue in this thread, in case you want to have a look.
Next release of the Lightning Pack will contain a good number of additional options to change the visual appearance of the game.
In addition to contrast, brightness and gamma there will be options to choose color temperature, which defines the "warmth" of a color. It's measured in Kelvin where higher values shift towards bluish tones and lower values shift towards reddish tones. The mod will come with a number of presets as well as an option to set color temperature manually.
Another set of options will allow you to modify hue, saturation and lightness. Hue shifts color frequency, so that red may become green, yellow or blue. Color saturation ranges from grayscale to oversaturation. Lightness can be seen as a different approach to brighten or darken colors.
Following are screenshots for all available (current and) new options:
I have tried to modify the lighting of the map background, but it doesn't work for me. I tried several values in the fpseam.glsl file, but they don't change how the game looks
After a lot of tinkering I think I've managed to isolate the source of this problem. Apparently it is the graphics option Nearest neighbor scaling. When I enable it this mod stops working, when I disable it, it works again.
Version 3.0 introduces options to change color temperature as well as hue, saturation and lightness. You can preview each individual setting in my previous post above or in the readme linked in the first post.
Full changelog:
Added settings: Color Temperature
Added advanced settings: Hue/Saturation/Lightness
Added proper Credits and Copyright sections to the readme
Thanks, that was totally necessary. May be can be better if used only dark tones adjustments leaving bright colors and contrasts without changes, but this is custom luminosity-curve approach which may be unavailable at all.
Comments
New version 2.1 of the Shader Pack can be downloaded from the link in the first post.
Changes:
- Added support for the latest BG2:EE update (which is currently in open beta).
Changes:
- Added support for Enhanced Edition patches v2.0
- Added check to prevent modifying files more than once
Changes:
And my question: In the instructions you say that one of the files is used for map background. What is map background?
It's basically the tileset of the map (i.e. the static background as well as water/lava overlays). Dynamic stuff such as creatures, visual effects or animations are not affected by this file.
Contrast: 1.2. Brightness: 0.1. Gamma: 1.1.
Contrast: 2.0. Brightness: 1.0. Gamma: 2.0.
Contrast: 10.0. Brightness: 10.0. Gamma: 10.0.
Am I doing something wrong?
This mod does only work with the (default) OpenGL renderer.
@argent77
Modifying saturation requires to perform some color space conversions though. I'll have to see if or how that can be done in pixel shaders first.
I finally reinstalled everything, and I still have the same problem. The general lighting adjustments work well, but the background adjustments in the file fpseam.glsl don't work, so it looks like it's a problem of mod compatibility. The mods I have installed are Ascension, Tweaks Anthology, SCS, Portraits Everywhere, Jimfix and EE UI Tweaks. Any idea of what might be causing the problem?
In the meantime could you check if there is a second instance of this file in one of the following directories, which could override your patched file?
- Documents/Baldur's Gate II - Enhanced Edition/Characters
- Documents/Baldur's Gate II - Enhanced Edition/Movies
- Documents/Baldur's Gate II - Enhanced Edition/Override
- Documents/Baldur's Gate II - Enhanced Edition/Portraits
- Documents/Baldur's Gate II - Enhanced Edition/Scripts
- Documents/Baldur's Gate II - Enhanced Edition/Sounds
- GAME/lang/xx_YY/Movies
- GAME/lang/xx_YY/Override
- GAME/lang/xx_YY/Sounds
- GAME/Characters
- GAME/Movies
- GAME/Portraits
- GAME/Scripts
- GAME/Sounds
where xx_YY is the language code of your selected game language.In addition to contrast, brightness and gamma there will be options to choose color temperature, which defines the "warmth" of a color. It's measured in Kelvin where higher values shift towards bluish tones and lower values shift towards reddish tones. The mod will come with a number of presets as well as an option to set color temperature manually.
Another set of options will allow you to modify hue, saturation and lightness. Hue shifts color frequency, so that red may become green, yellow or blue. Color saturation ranges from grayscale to oversaturation. Lightness can be seen as a different approach to brighten or darken colors.
Following are screenshots for all available (current and) new options:
Reference screenshot: Screenshot
Contrast, brightness and gamma:
Color Temperature:
Examples for Hue, Saturation and Lightness:
Version 3.0 introduces options to change color temperature as well as hue, saturation and lightness. You can preview each individual setting in my previous post above or in the readme linked in the first post.
Full changelog:
Changelog: