outside, the sun is shining and all is very bright. But in games it isn''t really so bright, in many games it looks like you are every time in a shadow. Isn''t it so bright in games, because it would look unrealistic, because of the lack of other shadows? And the shadows in games don''t look like the ones outside. They aren''t so sharp.

An ordinary monitor cannot provide the same contrast as daylight outdoors (that''s also why cinema looks better than TV, cinema projectors are bright).

Soft shadows are expensive to compute. That''s why games make do with hacks.

Documents [ GDNet | MSDN | STL | OpenGL | Formats | RTFM | Asking Smart Questions ]
C++ Stuff [ MinGW | Loki | SDL | Boost. | STLport | FLTK | ACCU Recommended Books ]

i think that the darkness is also used to portray the mood when you think about it.

Look at mario, and then look at resident evil.

Mario, fun, happy, sunshine, flowers and all that crap.
Resident Evil, dark, scary, zombies, mutants, and all the stuff that makes the world go ''round.


get the idea?

The darkness of games has to do with hardware limitations. Basically, if you drew everything at maximum brightness (by disabling lighting for example) it''s not that bright. Carmack did some sort of hack to make Quake III appear brighter than it normally would, I don''t know what. Adjusting the gamma values maybe?

~CGameProgrammer( );