galaxy brightness fun

[Sum0]

I just got an idea which seems obvious now... If you think galaxies are not bright enough, ramp up your graphics card (not monitor!) brightness!

I was playing Jedi Knight II, a Quake III engined game, when it crashed, like things do. For some reason, on my PC at least, when a Quake III engined game crashes, it leaves the desktop really bright for some reason. So, not being bothered to do anything else, I messed around in Celestia. For no reason, I zoomed out to see the entire Milky Way and it looked so much better!

So anyway, how do you set about getting it brighter? Short of playing games all day, ATI cards have a brightness control somewhere under Color in Display Properties. Geforce cards have a control in the nView properties, under Device Settings. Happy galaxy watching...

**update** With a little experimenting, it's really gamma that you want to change. On my Geforce 2 i've got it set at 2.76 with contrast a little higher than center so that space is blacker.

Side note - setting contrast really high makes star color stand out if you want to quickly find a particular type of star.

[billybob884]

Hey, would it be possible for you to put up a screen shot, or would it look like it normally does on other computers?

[Sum0]

I tried putting up a screenshot, and it just looked like the normal galaxy. I suppose I could Gimp it so it looked like what it does in Celestia...



That's as near as I can get, but it should look a lot like that...