(If you don't like pointless general discussion of the game and graphics, stop reading now. :-)

So I'm on the windows machine right now, down in Moorcroft's arcade. And it's dark. Real dark.

This monitor has a native gamma of about 1.7 -- everything's washed out. Video driver's simple "gamma correction" -- a slider to match alternating bars to constant color -- puts in a correction factor of .55.

And Moorcroft is dark. Upping it to .7 makes it brighter; just how bright is it supposed to be?

RGB is horrible for discussing what a color should be. LAB works much better, but I haven't seen any sort of "This should be that color" from the Arrtists here.

So, lets go down a gate, into the party lobby.

Hmm. You know, as I approach the elevator, the minimap shows some "land" to the far left, or far right. Hmm...

Looking off from the side of the party lobby platform, I can see the elevator shaft going down ... down ... down ...

And looking to the right, I see a little platform ... with something moving, shaking under it. Heck, under the elevator on my platform, I see something shaking.

Going back up, and looking from the arcade, at the platforms. Hey, their shape --
Going back down, and looking at the platforms. Why, right above the elevator, if I could look up --

Those "runways" that are visible from the arcade, right in front of the totem poles? Those are the party lobbies!

They're so far away that they look close to each other, and small. Right?

Well, sort of. I mean, the distance from one entrance gate to another is pretty close, and the distance from one platform to the next is large. The only way it could work is if there was some sort of distance distortion, so you actually got smaller as you went down. (Or something... angled elevator shafts to spread you out ...)

It's just ... from the left-most gate, going down, I can see another platform off to the left. And there's nothing actually there :-).

Alright, lets play and see if I can get more displayed. I'm in 1024x768 windowed mode. What happens in full-screen?

Answer: Turning up to full screen, highest resolution, gives me sharper pictures, but no wider view. The objects in the viewport are mapped as a percentage of the viewport width, not as a function of pixel count.

So at low resolution, I don't lose anything. Well, the chat text is bigger. But everything is still visible, in the same viewspace.

Hmm. Wonder what my mac would perform like if I tossed 800x600 full screen at it? Fewer pixels, no OS double buffering, and we just got a java update ... maybe (wish! :-) performance improvement? (naa, probably a minor security thing.)

Still, just some observations.

What colors should things be?
Kudos for "higher resolution == sharper", without giving bigger monitors more to look at and a playing advantage
Kudos for the party lobbies being what we see from the gate room. (Now if we could see some ants running around if a party was forming ...)