Request: Out of Cycle Live Patch to Fix DX11

Alternatively, you could roll back the patch, so people can actually play the game we're paying for?

His isn't a one off case, everyone should be able to alter gamma as they have for the last 25 years in game without messing up the whole computer for 1 game.

You guys should be patching daily to get this mess fixed so players can play the game they are paying for. We had daily patches when we previously had an engin change.

This, in one sentence, is why DBG is in trouble as a company. It's not always about you. I retired with 40 years professional IT development experience. I still code for recreational projects. I run Adobe Creative Cloud on both my primary desktop PC and my Mac Studio, which share the same 50" 4K display (Samsung). It is calibrated just fine, TYVM. I also (shock) play other games besides EQ. My original Steam account has 15 years service. I have a few other games in my library which have needed minor gamma tweaks in their settings for the sake of my vision. They all have an "Accessability" category in their game settings for that purpose, since they are graphics-intensive to begin with, and have been designed to be functional for the broadest cross-section of gamers possible. EQ is literally the only game in my installed library giving me any sort of grief with the gamma setting. And EQ used to work just fine, until you TOOK THE GAMMA SETTING OUT OF THE GAME, claiming it was necessry for the DX11 upgrade, when as a professional I know it was not. You did this. Take ownership, please.

The setting they used for windowed gamma under dx9 literally does not exist in dx11.

Just because there's not a 1:1 setting in dx11 doesn't mean dx11 doesn't support some kinda windowed gamma thingy because other games seem to have the ability.

Ding ding ding we have a winner.

If you have ever coded for one of these changes you know Microsoft provides suggestions and code examples to continue support for functionality or libraries that have been outdated.

It is great that you offered your help. Maybe you could stick a guide for that to the support forum. I think that you had the best intentions with your offer, even that some players feel offended by it. Calibrating a screen can be complicated and every player has different eyes which does make things even more complicated.

Any idea why the tab to desktop functionality is now broken after their screwup. I mean,,, patch?
worked seamlessly pre patch now its impossible to tab between toons and to desktop to research quests, etc.....

I hear you and I'd like to respond once more on this particular side topic (of this thread).

Please let me clarify any technical misconceptions. Unfortunately, Windows 10/11 and DirectX 11 have very restricted support for changing display gamma. There is one use-case where it's permitted: exclusive full screen mode and then only with graphics adapter support. This is according to Microsoft documentation and our own experience during the DX11 port. In other words, the old GDI code (SetDeviceGammaRamp) we had in the game client stopped working reliably, even with DX9.

See: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/w...gamma-correction#gamma-control-practicalities

Taken together, we currently have reported bugs with full screen mode in general, because of different behavior based on Windows version, graphics drivers, and settings. We also want to support exclusive full screen mode as it pertains to supporting IDXGIOutput::SetGammaControl (yes!). We're working on these issues.

As to the OP topic, I personally support the idea and have lent my voice to the cause.

Thank you. Yes, I'm drafting such a guide for AMD, Intel and NVIDIA adapters, with screen shots from Windows 10 and 11. I expect to have it written this week.

WOW! So why haven't the Devs. looked into this? The simplest of issues?.. Tab to desktop CAN be fixed...Why haven't they?

Is there any chance this could be approached without gamma?

Like shaders for example?

I have zero issues with the game being "dark" and no gamma slider isn't an issue... what is an issue is the blindingly BRIGHT textures/walls/floors in some zones (Bazaar) and if I remember right end zone in SoF has the same issue... and there are others but since I just returned to EQ after a longer break then I don't recall exactly which...

windowed gamma can be changed in Windows settings though... not ingame

A three-year-old article published at a time when MS was publicly admonishing third-party developers, gaming and otherwise, for manipulating gamma settings on-the-fly within their apps, to create visual trickery, which was never its intended use. You can see specific examples of bad behavior described in the article. Has EQ been doing this somewhere in its code that we've neve known about? If not, then we shouldn't have to worry about any of this article's caveats.

DirectX was designed from the beginning to allow a developer to give the end-user an option to provide app-specific gamma settings which would override that same user's chosen default values in Windows itself. The majority of developers try to make the initial app calibration as idiot-proof as possible ("Here are three images of varying brightness; adjust the slider below, if necessary, until the middle image is barely visible"). An expert user can be given the ability set specific numeric gamma values, either in the display settings or in an .ini file. Once the app's gamma is calibrated, it's treated as set-it-and-forget-it, unless the display hardware changes. The app is responsible for querying and saving the Windows gamma settings at launch, and then restoring those values upon exit. Error traps should provide for proper Windows gamma restoration if the app's exit isn't clean, and we've all seen examples of what happens when that doesn't work right.

I have yet to hear of any example from code to explain why EQ can't perform exactly as described above. Under no circumstances should any devs or any CS staff be telling users they need to re-calibrate their hardware, and/or Windows itself, to get EQ to display properly. If EQ is fully compliant with DX protocols, no trickery, then it should be easy to achieve, and all the API calls you need are in the standard DX library.

If we're not going to restore user-adjusted gamma in the DX11 client, then at the very least the current slider needs to be changed to increase, I would say double, its effective dynamic range. When the current slider is at max brightness, the gamma approximates the defauld windowed gamma in the DX9 client. This is still too dark for a lot of people. The default DX9 client gamma in fullscreen mode was signficantly lighter. Some players may have complained that it looked too washed-out, and that's fine, but we should still have the choice. The current max setting should be the mid-point of a slider with updated dynamic range. And I can't see how this could possibly be hard to do.

For you - for all three of my machines the brightness is pretty much spot on and has very little difference to what it was before, if it was doubled I'd go blind.

Then they need to examine the solutions that - and this is not hyperbole - every other game I have played in the last decade uses rather than plunge down this terrible rabbit hole that all our displays are somehow badly calibrated.

I have 6 different displays that I EQ on across my three machines. None of them have this issue at all. I'm not trying to be obnoxious at all, but I'm really curious as to how to see / replicate this issue. Is it just fullscreen? Is there a pattern to it at all?

The article Cairbrae linked mentions gamma is an adapter setting, and not all video cards handle it in the same way.

Also those of you saying it works for you happen to have a hardware-driver combo that responds to their gamma alterations in the way they hoped.

Everybody can have different setups, they shouldn't force your hardware to lighten the render.

And you should never calibrate your monitor to one game.

They need to send a render that is to the customers liking (brightness wise) to the adapter, not depend on a universe of different hardware to uniformly adjust gamma to achieve brightness.

Wait, you're saying that you have a fix that will likely make the game playable for a lot of people and there's someone (above you, I assume) looking at the situation and saying "Nah...make'em suffer with this crap until next month"?

Who is that person making the decision to NOT patch a fix?

The Badger of Doom.