Manipulating contrast in UT

[brazzjazz]

I don't know about your UTs, but I see for example in Deck16 dark corners and spots that are downright black, which bothers me both aesthetically and from a gameplay point of view. I'd rather have a slightly lower overall brightness instead. Since UT doesn't have separate brightness/contrast settings like its successors, is there a way to indirectly manipulate contrast in UT? I just want to lighten up the dark corners a bit, if that's somehow possible. I checked this thing up both with Direct3D and OpenGL, I actually couldn't discern a difference.

[UT99.org]

Have you try opengl and F11 ?

[gopostal]

You might tweak on your monitors settings a bit too (often overlooked).

[brazzjazz]

If I understand correctly, F11 doesn't do anything else than move the brightness ruler found in the UT options anyway. I guess it's just a level design issue, so that shady places were incorrectly made black instead of, well, shady. Probably it's because the lighting was much simpler back then without complicated straylight calculations.

[gopostal]

That pretty much nails it. I wonder if a smidge of zonelight makes it better for you? Add like 2 units of zonellight to the levelinfo properties and see if that clears it. If it does, I might make a mod that will do that.

[Hook]

In maps that you are making, you can control it with lighting and or ZoneLighting as Gopostal said.
If you merely want to play existing maps without changing the map itself, play around with your monitor settings.
That has always worked for myself and for Pro Gamers too!
Pro Gamers usually boost the brightness and take away some contrast on their Monitors to get a more well-lit map with less dark areas.

[heutenitaz]

Download the latest, UTGLR v3.5 and unzip it into unrealtournament/system, overwriting the default one. They support a lot of advanced settings, which are detailed on his page, but running it just like that will fix the gamma problem
The default OpenGL render that ships with the game has a gamma bug. Because Epic never support their games they didn't fix it, but a member of the community did. The enhanced renders can be found here: UTGLR

[Hook]

Maybe just best to leave it run in D3D instead of OpenGL.
You don't NEED OpenGL to play.
Your choice though.