Hi Everyone,

One of my customers is experiencing an unusual problem when playing my newest game. I wonder if I might call on your combined expertise to help get to the bottom of this...

He says that his LCD display dims when playing my new game, 'Groop', similar to how a "CRT monitor might do during power fluctuations" (his own words). He has tried 2 different LCD monitors but they both do it. Apparently 'Groop' is the only program that does this. He has a GeForce2 video card and is running XP Home.

Groop uses DirectDraw (requiring at least DirectX 6.1). It does not use DirectDraw gamma objects in any way.

Perhaps his display settings has a seperate brightness setting for DirectX and desktop apps?

Would it be possible for those of you with LCD monitors to give the demo of my game a quick run and see if you can replicate this problem? I would appreciate your help.

Thanks.

Wow, *another* New Zealand developer. Really, I had no idea...

I know my profile says Tokyo, but I'm actually from Napier. As far as your problem goes, I'm afraid I have an LCD but it's in Tokyo and I'm in Napier at the moment. So I'll shut up now.

Are there LCD monitors that save separate brightness/contrast/whatever settings for different resolutions the way CRTs do (or used to)? Could this have anything to do with refresh rate? I know many DX games run at 60Hz unless you force them higher somehow.

As I suspected. There are no graphical glitches in the game. It works perfectly.

I think it will be a driver problem.

Thanks for the quick feedback!

I figured it had to be something to do with unique display settings for different display modes or something. I just haven't tried it on an LCD screen before.

It worries me a little when he tells that the other 40 games on his machine don't have this problem! :-\

I'd be more worried by the fact that he said that he'd tried two different LCD monitors and they both did it... which kind of rules out the seperate brightness/contrast for different resolutions thing.

I downloaded and tried the game and I think I might see what your customer means. Maybe it's not a technical issue, it's just the way the game looks. The graphics are somewhat subdued. Start the game in a window next to, say, a web browser open to a page with lots of white and vibrant colors. You'll see that the "white" parts of the game pieces are gray, lots of gray text is used and the colors are generally a bit dim-looking. If the guy was using older LCDs with not-so-great brightness and contrast, maybe that made it even worse. Has he run it in a window? If he can run it in a window, compare it to the screenshots on the website and they look the same, then my theory must be correct. If it looks different when he goes fullscreen then maybe it's a real problem.

Btw, two notes about the game. First, the opening music is panned really strangely, with drums and bass all in the right speaker. Second, the game does not remember my fullscreen preference or window position (if I leave it windowed). It also assumes the taskbar is at the bottom and it docks itself to the top of the screen. My taskbar is at the top and the title bar of the game is almost completely obscured when it starts (this is a big pet peeve of mine).

Even though the symptoms are slightly different, this may be related to the "flickering on 1/10" thread that I started. I am also using DX6.1 and 1 or 2 of the machines that flickered were also XP systems running a geForce.

**This was not meant to hijack this thread, but I honestly think the two things could be related.

-Bruno

Hey - it's like the card game SET! Now why did I never think of doing that...

Surely greyness isn't the problem. It seems plenty bright enough to me.