Windows color scheme changes when launching DDO...

[Unreliable]

Hello, my Windows color scheme changes when I launch DDO...

It makes my screen very bright and white, and hard to see the lighter shades.

Its quite annoying, anyone know a way to stop it from changing the color scheme to ''vista basic'' when launching DDO?


Thanks.

[My2Cents]

I use XP, so I can't speak to vista, but I know in XP when I enter DDO it resets my graphics gamma and contrast (and some other things) to the DDO settings, and resets to my normal defaults on normal exit.

This may be obvious, but check your graphics settings (ESC->OPTIONS in the game)?

[sacredguyver]

Sounds like it may be kicking off the Aeroglass ability of Vista/7.

Go to the folder where DDO saves screenshots (Usually "\My Documents\Dungeons and Dragons Online") and open the "UserPreferences" file in notepad.

Be vary care not to edit anything unnecessarily, but look for the line "AllowDesktopCompositing." It is set to "False" by default. Change it (and only it) to "AllowDesktopCompositing=True" and save the file (not "Save As" but "Save").

Next time you load DDO, the Aero effects should not change. I did it on Windows 7 and DDO actually loads and exits faster for me, so it may help.

[notyetdead]

So I tried the editing as mentioned above, thank you. However, it did nothing to fix the gamma issue, it did increase the speed of loading and closing the game as well as repair a shutdown crash I've been sudddenly experiencing. I as well tried the gamma adjustment from the initial character selection options menu which did fix the issue with the exception that it made DDO far too dark to play. I know there is an answer out there because I found it a couple years ago then via re-install of vista need to find it again... wish my brains weren't oatmeal so I could recall the right question to google for the right answer. good hunting and if anyone crossing this thread should find that answer please put a link here for us or mail it to Pursepony in Sarlona and I'll put it up here for everyone else in need.

[Missing_Minds]

Under your driver settings you should have a selection that will augment gamma and brightness for ALL and for specified games.

[JamnJD]

I remember seeing a thread a while ago with a similar issue, and it actually had a turbine tech response. The player with the issue was running windows 7.

IIRC, the solution may have been to modify the launcher icon, and under compatability, I think the option was to disable windows visual themes or something like that.

Or it may not have been the launcher icon, it may have been the dndclient.exe file. Anyway, something to try.

...J

[dunklezhan]

I remember seeing a thread a while ago with a similar issue, and it actually had a turbine tech response. The player with the issue was running windows 7.

IIRC, the solution may have been to modify the launcher icon, and under compatability, I think the option was to disable windows visual themes or something like that.

Or it may not have been the launcher icon, it may have been the dndclient.exe file. Anyway, something to try.

...J

It seems there is a bug with the Aero features and DDO on some machines. Some folks (like me) need, all of a sudden (i.e. last month or so) have to tell the launcher to turn off desktop compositing (i.e. Aero interface), which make your desktop look as the poster describes when you run DDO. If we don't do this, launch and login times are unbearable and the game seems to crash occasionally.

In this case, it looks like somehow desktop compositing got itself turned on somehow - and a good job too otherwise the game would have been doing what the poster now describes it doing.

There may well be a fix for this OP, but I haven't found it. If you're suffering the long load times, you'll have to turn off desktop compositing. If you don't like what it looks like when you do, my best advice is run the launcher (to force off Aero), then go tweak all your gamma settings etc till you're a bit happier. Then close the launcher and see how much those changes affected things when aero comes back on. Tweak and tweak till you find a balance point you can live with.

I just live with Aero turning off when I launch DDO. Its not like I really need my desktop at that point except for the occasionally Alt/Tab

[AegonTargaryen]

Sounds like it may be kicking off the Aeroglass ability of Vista/7.

Go to the folder where DDO saves screenshots (Usually "\My Documents\Dungeons and Dragons Online") and open the "UserPreferences" file in notepad.

Be vary care not to edit anything unnecessarily, but look for the line "AllowDesktopCompositing." It is set to "False" by default. Change it (and only it) to "AllowDesktopCompositing=True" and save the file (not "Save As" but "Save").

Next time you load DDO, the Aero effects should not change. I did it on Windows 7 and DDO actually loads and exits faster for me, so it may help.

I'm using windows 7, and this helped me out SOOOOO much. It literally quartered my load time. +1