No matter how I tweak the engine file, colors are still washed with overblown skies. How can this be fixed? This wasn't the case before I had to reinstall the game.
tweak your monitor or whatever other windows/ video driver settings i can create that too if i want try an google or ai search type: windows 11 too much color??
On your PC system settings, have you got anything set up to automatically applied HDR to unsupported apps? I don't know too much about PC gaming, but on ps5 and xbox, if auto HDR is on, the game looks washed out a bit
In Windows you can't activate HDR if you did not have a HDR supported monitor. Windows blocked that option until you plugin a HDR certified monitor
I have to say, it’s difficult to understand what you’re talking about. ‘Washed out’ means de-saturated. What in that image is de-saturated and how is the sky overblown? That’s pretty much exactly what the sky looks like for real. The way the sky looks differs by time of day, season and position of the sun. It’s not deep blue all day every day Nothing will change because you’ve re-installed the game btw, it will be exactly the same as it was before.
My engine.ini has reduced the oversaturation of blue and the greying out of all the shadows visible in your screenshot, so it should be fixable.
Can you share the lines, that makes shadows less black especially at evening? Is there a way to reduce shadows multiplier?
The thing that always gets me with the TSW sky that stands out as opposite to how it works in the real world is how part of the eye adaptation and how it applies screen-wide based on a single point in the centre, is that when you horizontally position the central reticle looking at something in the foreground, like a column that blocks direct sunlight, everything gets less exposed, including the sky visible outside the windows to either side of the obstruction. Which is wholly counterintuitive, as looking at something indoors should not make the light visible from the outside less bright and exposed. In reality, the fact your eyes are focusing on things inside is what causes them to be less adapted to the light levels outside and so the stuff outside the windows should look brighter relatively. I have never been able to unsee this, and while it's useful for making it easier to distinguish signal aspects, it's an odd gameplay behaviour hack that ends up being an unrealistic way of doing things.
Less black? no. The main focus of mine was getting the shadows to be darker to make the trees, for example, look less like flat cardboard cutouts and more like there's actual shadows giving them a sense of depth. I think part of how I achieved that in mine was toning down the omnipresent and persistent haze effect that results in a grey filter over everything, which results in a lack of shadow contrast, subjectively flattening textures in the vanilla lighting.
I'd also like to know the line(s) with which you have accomplished this please. Would love to give it a try
I'll just upload a copy of it when I have a moment and people can fiddle. I am used to criticism of my settings when I post screenshots because it "looks too much like TSW2". Usual caveats will apply, like obviously that it's tuned for my displays and YMMV depending on if yours is IPS/OLED/etc.
I only reinstalled because I had to do a complete reset of my PC. Colors in general just seem faded and lacked depth. Desirable results posted above.
Exactly. The problem is that all these edits mostly shift the contrast. While the sunlit scenery become a bit realistic and pleasing to the eye, the shadows immediately turn into black holes. Another problem is that DTG created their own "ToD", which overrides the vanilla settings of UE4, making standard edits impossible. Because of "ToD" we have a colorless world when it's cloudy. Because of "ToD" we have a pale haze 200 meters from the player, which cannot be removed in cloudy weather. Ideally, DTG should take overcast weather and handle it. Defeat discoloration. Remove that pale haze by tying it to humidity settings, instead of cloudiness. But we know they won't waste time on this, and would rather release 3 more buggy routes that will never be fixed.
At first I did more like the more natural look of the old TOD. However, after playing a lot of TOD4 routes, it's hard to go back to routes with the old TOD. Especially on sunny days, everything is to dark, even on mid day, while TOD4 routes are to bright, but stuff in the shadow looks more realistic. In conclusion, with both TOD's, the balance between lighted stuff and shadows is not good. The shadow pop-in also doesn't help, which is more noticable with TOD4.
Sadly, to truly have properly realistic looking shadows would require a porting of the game to UE4.27 and a rebuild of every single route to replace the baked lighting with RT. Good luck to anyone who wants to take that task on. How pronounced that is, like the blown out lighting itself, does seem in part to come down to the gamut of your monitor's peak luminance and black levels, evidenced by how different the game looks when you sling it across to an older spare monitor, so individual tolerances for either will vary.
RT can do good things, but it will come with a cost, performance. You see the game now already struggling, for example with long shadows. I don't think putting RT in the current game is a good idea. Besides this, also with baked lighting you can get better results then what we see in TSW. I don't know it UE is debit on this, for example Snowrunner has a better balance between bright and areas in the shadow. A good monitor can make a difference for sure, my monitor has a good contrast, especially for an IPS screen, but on routes with the old TOD, everything is still way to dark. The black levels on a IPS are not the best, VA panels do usual have deeper black levels, which means it will become even more dark with less details. Maybe it's better with OLED, but haven't experience myself with gaming on OLED.
Frankly there are plenty engines out there that handle RT much better than UE. iDTech being the standout, but also REDengine, Northlight, Snowdrop, 4A, hell Fatshark even got it running with solid performance in goddamn Stingray (even if it does require a lot of tweaking in the Nvidia control panel to remove the flickering). The most immediately noticeable thing there of course is that virtually every engine I listed is a studio's proprietary one. Jack of all trades, master of none, etc. Not to say UE cannot do it performantly, but TSW is really not the best game in this engine for trying that with.
Most UE5 games are running poorly, the ones running ok are the ones not using Lumen and Nanite. Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 has global illumination without RT and looks pretty good and the performance is pretty good too. CryEngine's technique is called SVOGI (Sparse Voxel Octree Global Illumination). But overall, proprietary engines most of the time do a way better job then UE.
Might not be relevant, but depending on your video card, there is a setting you need to change to activate its full colour range, which I have found in the past isn't on by default. It makes everything look washed out.
This is good feedback and you made your point very succintly.... This dig really isn't needed and in my opinion distracts from the point you were making
It also depends on the display. I once enabled full color range support on my old Samsung, and instead of black darkness in some games(like Metro Exodus) I got the effect of a cheap TN panel(distorted grayness), even though the monitor was a VA. On my current Dell(IPS) it works without problems.
So I've taken a look at this. I looked at the training center using the downstairs TV, and looked at it on my upstairs monitor and it wasn't as saturated on my upstairs monitor. And then everything looked more desaturated, so I'm assuming it's my monitors. I've cheated by turning up the saturation...
TV's most of the time do all kind of processing to make the image more saturated, with bright colors splashing of the screen. To show of TV's in stores, there is even a special mode on TV's to make the screen even more bright and saturated. Personally I don't like those over saturated colors and to much brightness at all, but a lot of people seems to like it. So most likely, your monitor shows a more natural and correct picture.
The quality of your monitor absolutely plays a role in the gaming experience and the quality of the image being displayed. I used to have an IPS monitor and now I have an OLED gaming monitor, and it makes a huge difference in colour reproduction and the sharpness of the image. With my OLED monitor it really feels like next‑level gaming. Not just with TSW, but also with games like Tomb Raider or Mafia: The Old Country, which I’ve recently played it’s genuinely a joy to play them like this. Of course, there is a price tag attached to a monitor like that.
