We had the unpleasant surprise of discovering that our game’s output was VERY dark on some monitors.
The first time it happened was when connecting our regular PCs to TVs through HDMI. We compensated the issue by setting the driver’s gamma to around +2. But it also yielded ugly colors because of the induced bit crushing…
Today we discover this also happens on one of our team member’s monitor ! This is only builds, never in the editor.
Did anyone ever experienced something like this ? Was it some bad player setting ?
Off the top of my head, I’d like to add that we use the deferred rendering path with linear color space, graphic API automatically set on all platforms, we only allow 16:9 resolutions…
Buggy configurations :
Core i5-4690 / GTX 960 / 8GB RAM / Win 10 64, connected through HDMI on a Sony Bravia TV 40EX720 (works nicely with LG W2261V through DVI)
Core i7-4700MQ / GTX 765m / 8GB RAM / Win 10 64, connected through HDMI on some Phillips TV (post will be updated with proper reference) (works nicely with built-in screen)
Core i7-3770K / GTX 460 / 16GB RAM / Win 7 64, connected through DVI on monitor LG 2252TQ (but works nicely on Asus VK191D connected with VGA through DVI adapter)
The issue is dependant only on the monitor, the same build/assets is/are fine if ran on the same PC but with a different monitor.
I could also add that the other apps running on the computer with the monitors causing the issue are fine. Only the game is very dark, not the rest of the apps running on the computer, so it’s not an issue with the monitor.
AFAIK, only our build does that. So I’m thinking we probably have a mistake in our player settings but I’ve no idea what could cause that.
But, it’s worth mentioning that for the case of the TVs, the computers have never been hooked up that way (at least for the sony, I’ll ask for the phillips). So there might be other games having the issue. Next time I do that setup, I’ll try other unity and non-unity games. I’m gonna ask for the computer monitor.
EDIT: nope, never had the issue with another game than ours on all those setups.
Ok so this now seems to be random. We had a build that didn’t have the dark screen issue on the LG 2252TQ monitor. The same build on <some monitor I don’t know> that we gave to a twitch streamer had the issue! It can be seen here :
Any idea what could cause this ? We’re still running 5.4.1f1 btw.
Edit: And now that I think of it, it might be totally unrelated with the monitor since the darkening is on the recording! Also, he didn’t complain so maybe on his monitor the game was fine?..
Edit2: Just asked him, the game was fine on his monitor yesterday. Only the recording is very dark. But the darkness really matches the issue described above on our monitors. This is so weird!
it looks like an issue with linear lighting. There have been several linear lighting fixes over the 5.4 patches so try the latest patch and see if this fixes the problem.
