DZDoom is darker than Zdoom?

[axtarmas]

I built a wad around Zdoom. It has the lighting characterisitics i wanted to have. But when i try the wad on Gzdoom everything is darker. Why is this happening? Is it a side effect of the antialiasing Gzdoom offers?

[Melon]

Software renderers like in ZDoom can only display a limited range of colours at any one time. This tends to make the darkness fall into various broad ranges of darkness based on how dark the sector is and how far away it is (stuff that's further away is drawn a bit darker).

GL renderers have no such issues and can display a whole range of colours, as such they can accurately have all 256 levels of brightness display at different levels.

In addition to this, GL renderers handle gamma settings differently to software renderers. In software the various gamma settings just use a brighter set of colours, but in GL renderers they tend to just increase/decrease the brightness levels of all the sectors.

Basically, it's kind of impossible to make them both look the same, and GZDoom will look wildly different for different people based on the gamma settings they use. Nothing you can really do about it. As a general rule of thumb I rarely make sectors lower than 90 brightness as that's extremely dark in software rendering and GL tends to start getting pitch black below that.

[axtarmas]

Then, maybe i should make one wad version for zdoom and one for gzdoom and on the one of gzdoom to make all sectors a littile more brighter?

[Phml]

To me, it'd make more sense to tweak your GZDoom until you hit lightning values you're happy with, and then recommend those settings in the text file bundled with your wad. You can adjust brightness and gamma settings in "display options", and there's also "sector light mode" in "display options > openGL options > preferences", which I think is on "dark" by default these days (switching this one to "standard" is my first step on a fresh GZDoom install, it is definitely too dark otherwise).

[axtarmas]

Ok thanks for the info, i did not know gzdoom has DARK by default in options.

[Gez]

See wiki for explanations about the various lighting modes. "Dark" is an eyeballed approximation of the light diminishing in Doom's standard colormap; "Doom" and "Software" are incrementally closer approximations however they require hardware/drivers with GLSL support.

An alternative to changing light mode is increasing the ambient light level, or boosting the brightness and/or gamma.