Half Life 2 way too dark to see

[CheesyD]

Never mind... got it figured out...




I just bought and installed Half Life 2 on my PC. The problem is the game is too dark for me to see what the heck I'm doing. I've adjusted the gamma via the in-game option settings to be as light as possible. I've adjusted the brightness on my monitor to be as bright as possible. Still can't see well enough to even walk around.

I do not have this problem with any other game or application I use. EQII was dark at first but the in-game gamma adjustment easily fixed it.

I have an eVGA Nvidia GeForce 6800 128MB video card (not the GT) running the latest Nvidia drivers (7.1.8.9 released 4/1/05). I have an AMD Athlon 64 3200+ processor, 1MB RAM, using a MSI K8N Neo-FSR Nvidia nForce 3 250Gb Chipset motherboard.

Any ideas?

Edited to add: Was also too dark using the previous version of Nvidia drivers.

[tgtshuter]

Sorry, no ideas...just wanted to not ignore your post.

I've had no problems like that with HF-2. I run it with the default brightness settings.

Certainly something wrong there, but if other apps run fine, you'd have to say it's not hardware...except maybe an issue with Nvidia cards?
Have you search HF-2 forums and Nvidia site?

[CheesyD]

Turns out I have to go into NVIDIA settings/color correction and turn the brightness up in order to see in the game. Once I'm done playing I have to turn it down again otherwise everything else I run is washed out. Weird but it works.

[Glockman67]

I'd "cheat" and would adjust the gamma settings.

I can't want to play this game, just ordered myself a new rig.

:cool:

gman67

[Kevin108]

There's also a console command you can use to brighten it up. You'd have to Google life Half Life 2 console commands or something, plus figure out how to get the console in it. I only played the game like 3 times before I decided it sucked and went back to Counter Strike.

[fastvfr]

Installing the Souirce engine is such a convoluted mess that something is bound to go wrong at least half of the time...

And then Steam has to tinker with the code to de-encrypt it, and THEN it Updates itself and the game as well.

So my guess is that one of the rendering routines got b0rked at some point.

Try washing the CD's in hot water and reinstalling the game after they dry.

This sort of thing will not happen with an intact, properly-installed game.

Lots of others play it on exact copies of your (pretty good) gaming PC and have none of these problems, right?

I'd reinstall.

Good luck!!

[Fingolfin]

I had that problem too, every game was dark, never could figure it out. I almost trashed my monitor i got so pissed.

http://img57.exs.cx/img57/879/thxdevs.jpg

[Daver308]

I also had this problem with an Nvidia card, had to get a game cheat so as to actually play the game.