Adjusting the in-game brightness settings don't produce any immediate change for me, but sometimes they seem to take affect after rebooting the game... and sometimes they don't. More often the former than the latter. Like the game is defaulting to the lowest possible brightness. It makes the levels so dark I can barely see what's going on. Anyone know what's going on here? Or better yet, have a fix?

Right now I'm stuck constantly rebooting the game until it decides to recognize the right settings, which is... not ideal.

This is totally uncommon for stef2
.make sure you got latest driver
And provide some details to your Hardware please
Cpu gpu wich Windows?

i5 4570 / RX 580 / Win10

So it is not a laptop.
I would guess this to be a driver issue with OpenGl and this series of AMD
- Have you tried renaming ef2.exe to quake3.exe ?
- Change in the Video Settings Menu under Advanced the Light Performance settings and try different Checkboxes activated
- You can try newer and older drivers for your gfx card.

If this does not work for you there must be some sort of Tool or GFX or Software that is creating this issue, as I said this is absolutely uncommon for STEF2 to have this kind of a problem.

Yeah, I'm using the quake3.exe to launch the game. And the newed gfx drivers. Guess I'll play around with the in-game and Radeon settings....

Ya, let us know how it turns out.

I can offer you more help if you want to in private chat.
I would be really interested in what is causing that.

No luck so far. Should I be restarting the game each time I adjust the in-game video settings, do you think?

I don't think that is the solution, hoe ever you can enter a command into the console and it will restart only the Video/Graphics:
vid_restart, much faster and you can stay in the game.

Okay, so I think I figured out what's causing it. I -think- it's a result of enabling HDR in Windows 10's HD Color settings. So far EF2 only seems to go wonky on me when it's enabled. I think it may be interacting somehow with recent GPU drivers? I only thought to check when I noticed Windows suddenly getting really dim for no good reason--like the HDR is broken or crashing or something. I dunno.

The point is, if anyone has this issue, try disabling HDR.

Ah, I see, that is great to know!

If you don't mind I would like to include that in my Troubleshooting Guide I am preparing.

Feel free.

I always had a brightness problem with Star Trek Elite Force. Years ago I got this fix off of the Activision Customer Support site:

1. Start the Game
2. Press Tilde "~" key to bring down the console
3 Set your intensity value higher. At the prompt type:

r_intensity X (Enter) X default is 1. try 1.1, 1.2 etc.

4. change gamma setting

r_gamma X Default is 1 try 1.1, 1.2 etc

5. type vid_restart

other commands:
r_ignorehwgamma 1 (enter)
vid_restart

r_ignorehwgamma 0 (enter)

This still works with Star Trek Elite Force 1 , Maybe it works for STEF II?