Ok, I have spent along time building a subterrainian map, worked a lot on making light and dark areas to force the use of night vision. only to have players crank their brightness levels up where it looks like its bright daylight, even in the drakest areas. Is there a way to force their brightness low, or detect that their brigthness is too high and warn then kick them from the server? Night vision is such a key to this map, that without it puts them at way to high of an advantage and ruins the gameplay.

I would have thought not, all things like contrast, color, resolution etc.. are input by the user and therefore quite custom. Also if it was possible to prevent you increasing the brightness control on your pc there will be no way to stop you just increase your 'monitor/tv' settings.

The reason I am asking is because back in the day with AmericaArmy I thought we could set a cvar check for gamma and brightness and then use that to kick from the map. Trying to do the same thing.

I mean with the brightness up so high it ruin all the work real work I put into the map and is not fair to other players.

Unless you're running the map on your own server, leave the kicking to the server admins. Do not include code which could result in kicking players in your map. This will only annoy players and server admins and thus make your map not very popular.

I should be able to check the dvar used by players, but as I stated, please don't use that to kick players from your map. That's an admins job, not yours or your map.

Place a message at the beginning of your map to tell players to leave their brightness down and use the nightvision instead...

Fair enough - what I really want is a way to force client var to a low brightness.

Ok, so is there a way to check the brightness level and kick players from my server if it is too high.

I'm not sure if there is a way to force a dvar to a certain value. Even if it was possible, I wouldn't do that. If a player wants to play with a high brightness, let him. As Rasta pointed out, you van easily adjust your screen brightness setting if you want to, so there is always a way around if the player really wants it.
Also, if you could set a brightness it would have to be the same for every player.. which is a pain in the a**, as not everyone plays with the same screens and light conditions.
It might not be what you want for your map, but it happens. No way of preventing everything.

You should be able to check the dvar for the brightness setting for a player I think. There is the getdvar command, but I'm not sure if that works on players or if it's for server dvars only.

edit: and if not, I think there is a pb command to check for certain dvars and kick a player if it's not between two values.


edited on Jun. 14, 2008 11:57 am by The_Caretaker

Just to add to this, I'm facing similar problems to this, as I am creating a night (more of an late evening) map, and with the brightness settings allowed to be changed from 0 to 3 (r_gamma) this makes making a night map almost impossible.

My map on r_gamma 1.2 looks fantastic, great lighting from street lights, buildings, spot lights, etc, etc. But with the r_gamma above 1.3 it begins to look like a day map :(

Hmmmm I was going to show you some examples of the map with the correct lighting as I wanted and without, however when taking screenshots it appears to ignore the brightness :(

PS: Also I dont think the map as got any atmosphere about it when it is over bright, looks way better as an evening map.


Would lowering the sky colour/brightness help?