Battlefield 3: Back to Karkand - Colour grading comparison
A Battlefield 3 comparison video showing how all four Back to Karkand maps look with and without colour grading. In each scene, the standard version of the map is shown first, followed by the modified version.
How it was done:
This was achieved by editing the game files to disable colour grading.
Insanecrimsontide and I have developed a tool which you can use to do this. It allows you to tweak the colours and lighting on any map in the game. Download it here:
If you want to duplicate my results exactly, then here are the exact settings I used:
1. Colour grading disabled.
2. Brightness (red, green, and blue) increased to 1.2.
3. Contrast (red, green, and blue) increased to 1.2.
4. Saturation (red, green, and blue) increased to 1.
You should use these same settings for each of the four Back to Karkand maps. Leave the hue and sunlight intensity values at their defaults. Of course, you can further tweak these values to suit your tastes.
Background music:
The background music used in this video consists of the three loading tracks from Battlefield 2. Specifically, the US loading theme, the Chinese loading theme, and then the MEC loading theme. You can find these on YouTube easily.
Clarification regarding bans (added 2012-10-04):
There seems to be a lot of confusion regarding whether or not this mod is safe. Many appear to be under the impression that people have been banned for this - this is NOT the case.
At the current time, there have been zero legitimate reports of bans or even kicks for this. Modding the game files with Frankelstner’s tool (something different) can get players kicked for “MD5Tool Mismatch“; this is something manually set up by server administrators, and DOES NOT happen with our own tool.
DICE has not yet made any official announcement regarding Battlefield 3 mods. The comments that people have been discussing have indeed come from a DICE employee, but on his own personal Twitter account where he can post his own thoughts and opinions. To clarify, he said that players *could* get permanently banned for modifying the game files. He didn’t say that anyone is already getting banned, and he didn’t guarantee that people would get banned. Interestingly, he has deleted his comments from his Twitter page.
I have been contacted by a GGC head admin about my tool. GGC is an anti-cheat system used by many game servers. I don’t want to go into all the details, but he has informed me that GGC will not punish for the colour tweaks made by BF3 Colour Tweaker.
Finally, some people have attacked me for not including a warning that this could get players banned. As discussed above, it currently doesn’t get players banned, but even so there HAVE been warnings from the start. The program we developed has a giant warning message displayed on the first run that is impossible to miss.