DRD Team

I just wondered if anyone knows of a way of resetting the screen after an OpenGL application crashes?

You know the problem - you're using an OpenGL app and it exits unexpectedly. You get dumped to the desktop but your resolution and/or gamma settings are likely to be messed up. Restarting the computer will set things right again, but sometimes it's not convenient to do that right away. So, does anyone know of any "soft" way of doing it?

Not GZdoom specific, I know, but that's the prog it happened most recently with for me.

My card software has an option for adjusting the gamma/brightness/contrast and has hotkeys for doing so. When ever the screen isn't it's proper gamma I can just use the hotkeys to reset it. I have an ATI card, so not sure if you have the same. Resolution is easy to fix just by changing resolution (which there might be hotkeys for).

If you're using nVidia graphic cards, you can check out the Desktop Management features it has by enabling the nView Desktop Manager features (be sure to switch to Classic View first because the new GUI is a load of crap).

It also has hotkey support, and you can tell the hotkey to activate a profile, which is most probably what you want. Save your custom profile, and when GZDoom hangs, just hit the hotkey.

EDIT: Be warned though that while this may fix your resolution problems, in some cases it might not fix your brightness or gamma. When Doom 3 crashed unexpectedly for me the other day, it would get stuck with Doom 3's colour settings eventhough my nVidia settings are all apparently at default. I had no other choice but to restart.

The way I do it is by going to display options and previewing a different resolution and back.

I'll look into my settings. However, for me the problem is usually the gamma, rather than the resolution, because I tend to run games at the same res as my desktop.

This is what I use:

http://cwdohnal.home.mindspring.com/setgamma/

Just setgamma -reset and done

Hey thanks. That seems to work. Unfortunately, kind of, I'm having difficulty getting an OpenGL program to crash ATM to test it properly.

Enjay wrote:Hey thanks. That seems to work. Unfortunately, kind of, I'm having difficulty getting an OpenGL program to crash ATM to test it properly.

Know of anything offhand that causes a guarunteed crash in an older version of GZDoom?

yes: launch a saved game on an altered version of a pwad without having built again the glnodes. If you build again the glnodes, Gzdoom will simply advise you that it was expecting a name but found something else, but it won't crash.

Much easier:

Type 'crashout' in the console and you get a nice access violation.

But that's a "proper" way of crashing GZDoom... the program handles it.

We're talking about the generic unexpected Microsoft-style crash... the kind where the display mode won't be reset back to normal, and everything that the program is supposed to do when it closes normally does not happen.

Actually, crashout did it just fine. It left me at the desktop with my gamma settings too high and setgamma fixed them. Thanks all.

That's weird. crashout perfectly resets the gamma and brightness settings for me. o_O