Yeah It's weird the comments I'm getting about the darkness seem to be one extreme or the other. Some people say they are fine for them others say hardly viewable. The big problem I am having as well is no one is providing any screen caps for me to compare to what we each see so kinda playing guess work for the most part on this issue. How to get it right with my monitors is seeming to be the issue apparently.....
Hi, Thanks for the explanation and for creating and sharing your game. I thought I would make a comment about this because it's a very subjective topic and one I've had to deal with in the past too.
How a scene (or image) looks on one persons computer / monitor will vary considerably to another persons. There are too many influencing factors, like video card settings / profiles, monitor type / age / quality, type of device being used (tablet / pc etc) and the largest factor is the amount and quality of ambient light in the room. So playing your game at night with no room lights on, then your Naida scene is a little easier to see, but play it during the day in a room with lots of natural light and that scene is basically black. The other factors are not just what settings you have configured on your video card, but also what the monitor is physically set to in regards to profile / brightness / contrast and gamma. There are too many factors that you can't control, so I would suggest that you don't attempt to factor them in, but this is does not mean the end of this topic though.
I myself use products from X-rite to correctly calibrate my monitors. These are devices you plug into USB then set on the monitor. They run a test pattern and at that time also record ambient room light. They then create a colour profile for that monitor under those specific room lighting conditions. That way when I am editing photos taken for customers (and I use X-rite colour checker / passport to create colour profiles for all my DSLR's too), I know the colours are accurate, irrespective of what device the customer chooses to view the photos on (mobile / tablet / laptop or pc etc).
Those calibration products may or may not be beneficial for you, but one small thing I would suggest, is not focus on all the numbers and values with your settings, but actually inspect your images. Best way to do this is, not by viewing them, but by checking the histogram. This will give you a much better understanding as to how it will be displayed. So render a frame (or image) then load that image into a photo viewing / editing program, such as adobe lightroom, adobe photoshop or free programs like Nikon's Capture NX-D.
Viewing the histogram is the best way to see it. If the graph is all bunched up in the far left then it's too dark, if it's all bunched up in the right, it's too light. Use a program that can give you a RGB histogram so that way you can check each channel.
If you do a test and render a scene (like the twins with Nova), their room scenes have the standard / expected histogram graph shape. From there I would assume you can just decrease the light source intensity until you create a more ambient mood?
I see in a previous post someone has already provided an example of a histogram from one of your images and the graph is very condensed to the left. They will display dark to black for majority of people, especially if viewed in a room with reasonable ambient light. For me I would consider them way too dark and that would not be something I could return to a paying customer.
Hope that helps.
