I see some posts from last year regarding workarounds for a brightness patch they did, which removed gamma/brightness/contrast slider bars and defaulted to very bright. This is obviously ridiculous, and I can’t capture lighting effects I used to create in custom maps.
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…).
Night is purposely very bright so as to not impact melee gameplay. 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.
To change this one can use custom day/night models, which can be dynamically changed by triggers. These custom models allow one to specify the tint as well as light intensity. 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. Like wise a brightness of 10 would make it look like the sun is swallowing the world with bloom lighting blurring everything together.
Use something like Retera’s model studio to modify the day/night models. One can export an existing one, change it and import it back into the map using the asset manager. 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.
I think there is currently a limitation that one cannot modify the day/night model used by World Editor. The changes will only work inside Warcraft III when playing the map.
There never was any brightness or contrast slider. Gamma is something completely different and never was used or even implemented correctly.
This might be due to lighting logic having been fixed when playing with Reforged graphics. Classic graphics uses incorrect (out right wrong) calculations when it comes to lighting. Yes this allowed some now impossible to create visual effects but these effects generally were quite poor.
Gamma cannot really be darkened as it is a scalar value rather than an intensity. 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 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. This comes from the old days of analogue CRT monitors which could have different gamma curves and hence needed “gamma correction”. 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.
As 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. 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. Of course Warcraft III classic (both now and in the past except for version 1.32.0) does none of this and instead uses “gamma corrected” textures in the linear RGB lighting maths of the GPU and assumes the output is already “gamma corrected” with the actual “gamma correction” field modifying the gamma around the sRGB point. Hence why its lighting was kind of rubbish in retrospect.
The modern pipeline, likely used by Reforged, is to load textures as sRGB (a GPU feature not available when classic was made), perform linear RGB maths on those values and then HDR shader to transform the linear RGB values into sRGB for display. This allows the intensity levels calculated by the GPU to be correctly translated to emission from the display panel as well as allow for other lighting effects including intentional skewing.
You can download ReShade and turn on gamma (LiftGammaGain), technicolor, tonemap or similar stuff and only use the sliders that make the game brighter.
Edit: Oh, I only read the title. xD Maybe check out curves & levels in ReShade and just play around with both and see if you can find something you like.
