citadel, riverbed looks funky, voodoo3 card

[Wallybob]

Don't quite know what to tweak, if I should.

Riverbed has a slew of green,blueish areas, almost as bright as unit bases. Really looks wierd.

[Sarge Saunders]

Bump. I get a funny riverbed too. But mine is white. Win 2000, ATI mobility rage pro vid card, Dell inspiron 7500.

[Schrullenhaft]

Using the 1.03.00 drivers under Win2K with DirectX 8.1 the textures look fine in the 'ancient riverbed'. I'll take a look at Win98SE and see if that holds true there too.

I have the FSAA set to 'Fastest Performance' and the Z-Buffer Optimization set to 'disabled'. The Level of Detail Bias is set to -0.50, but that shouldn't really have that much of a difference on the grass tiles of the ancient riverbed (the default is 0 and lower numbers result in 'sharper' textures - if you can notice).

On the Voodoo 3 3000 AGP many of the texures are downsampled, even though the card has 16Mb of VRAM. The sky bitmaps are especially down sampled and most other items are too such as 'grass', buildings and vehicles.

[Schrullenhaft]

OK, I believe I've reproduced the problem.

It happens under Win98SE, and I assume it will happen under WinME too. It doesn't happen under Win2K and possibly XP. Using the 1.07.00 driver (I believe) with DirectX 8.1 for Win9x.

What I saw when running the Demo at 1024x768 was that the lowest part of the 'ancient riverbed' was white (blank textures). This part was almost right next to the road in the riverbed and constitutes the lowest elevation on the map. None of the settings generically available to the 3dfx tools will affect this problem. I believe that it is possible that these 'blank textures' may come up in different colors other than white, it's happened in the past with CMBO.

The only solution was to run CMBB at 800x600. Enough VRAM becomes available at this resolution that the textures appeared correctly.

[ September 02, 2002, 04:02 AM: Message edited by: Schrullenhaft ]

[Sarge Saunders]

Originally posted by Schrullenhaft:

Using the 1.03.00 drivers under Win2K with DirectX 8.1 the textures look fine in the 'ancient riverbed'

Are you referring to my ATI drivers? I can go and check what version I have. Also, I am running at 1024, which is were I want it. I am not overly concerned with this unless other textures get "funny" too.

-Sarge

[Schrullenhaft]

No, I'm referring to the Voodoo 3 drivers of the original poster. I don't have a Rage Mobility to test with, though I would guess that the issue may be similar (you're attempting to run CMBB at too high a resolution compared to the amount of VRAM you have).

These are the latest ATI Mobility P drivers for Windows 2000 for the Dell Inspirion 7500. They're a bit dated and I suspect you probably already have them installed.

I don't know if these Compaq Rage Mobility drivers are for the same chip as yours or if they'll even work on your Dell, but they might be newer.

And here's a Rage Mobility driver from another laptop manufacturer.

[Sarge Saunders]

Originally posted by Schrullenhaft:

I don't have a Rage Mobility to test with, though I would guess that the issue may be similar (you're attempting to run CMBB at too high a resolution compared to the amount of VRAM you have).

These are the latest ATI Mobility P drivers for Windows 2000 for the Dell Inspirion 7500. They're a bit dated and I suspect you probably already have them installed.

I don't know if these Compaq Rage Mobility drivers are for the same chip as yours or if they'll even work on your Dell, but they might be newer.

And here's a Rage Mobility driver from another laptop manufacturer.

Thanks Schrullenhaft. I actually back-leveled from newer Dell provided ATI driver to an older driver on the Win 2k disc. The newer driver ran CMBO in a higher resolution and color depth but performed horribly slow. Must have been doing something to compensate for lack of onboard VRAM...perhaps swapping from RAM...I dunno. Anyway my current older drivers ran adequately for CMBO in 1024 resolution.

BTW, besides this odd white tile CMBB runs even better on this dated video card! Smoother, faster, and with better detail. So actually paint me a happy camper.

Thanks,

Sarge

[Saukopf]

I too am getting the odd white ancient riverbed glitch. Im definately running a subpar

system..Win98 410.1998 with an 8meg Jaton

Blade pro based on Trident 9880 chipset- drivers

6.50.542 ...based on the responses above it

would appear this a VRAM issue and so maybe

there is no tweaking workaround. Im suprised

since the rest of the game looks superb and plays

well. Is there nothing I could do

to fix this problem?(short of video card upgrade)I was thinking maybe the tile

sets in question could be modded into something

my video card could "see" Hmmm....If there is no workaround could

someone give me an idea as to how common the

affected terrain is....for instance if I generated

random quick battles...is this a type of terrain

the computer program would pick often (?

[foamy]

My White river bed is now all colors which shimmer as I pan the view ??

Win 98, Voodoo 3000, Asus Mother board with VIA chipset gave the White riverbed

Motherboard died two days ago, so replaced with ECS Elite SIS735; chipset, 2000+ AMD CPU, now River bed is all colors and quite horrible ??

Should I get a new Graphics card - Which one ??

[Schrullenhaft]

foamy - Have you applied the SiS chipset drivers (agp110.exe) to your install ?

I'm not sure why the riverbed's lowest terrain consistently comes up with the white or multi-colored textures. Quite possibly it is loaded last among textures (or something to that effect) in CMBB and thus it suffers the textures problems.

The downsampling is supposed to help with fitting textures into VRAM. Interestingly this problem doesn't occur in Windows 2000 (and possibly XP). These textures could possibly be resized into smaller bitmaps and that might fix the issue (a 'low res' grass mod).

The other fix I mentioned was to run at 800x600, which fixed the issue for me under Win98SE. Not a perfect solution if you want to run in a higher resolution, but it works.

Saukopf - I don't know if these drivers v. 6.50.5452 are any newer than the 6.50.542's you mentioned (probably not), but they may be worth a try.

Again, reducing CMBB's resolution to 800x600 should help if you're actually running higher. As I mentioned above the 'grass' textures could probably be moded to lower resolution versions, but I'm not sure where else this problem may show up (buildings, large numbers of AFVs, etc.).

I have a Trident 9880 here (in fact it's a Jaton too), but I haven't stuck it in a machine yet to check it out yet with CMBB.

Depending on what machine you're running (older Socket 7 motherboard, certain chipsets, whatever) a comparitively cheap upgrade would be a PCI or AGP TNT2 M64 32Mb (the AGP version is actually cheaper) at around US$50 for the PCI version. Generally it should do OK with most motherboards, but there is a possibility of incompatibility with some much older boards with AGP slots (old Intel LX or old Socket 7 boards with AGP, etc.). It's performance would be better than the Trident and probably roughly on par with the Voodoo 3 (though it has more video memory). I'm not sure how good the actual image quality will be. Many people wouldn't notice the difference, but some others notice it a lot (with the TNT possibly being worse, but this can be quite subjective). I haven't noticed much of a difference myself (although there are gamma differences, which is a major part of what I think people are perceiving). The TNT2 M64 benefits (though it doesn't utilize all the features of) the latest NVidia drivers. So you can be relatively assured of up-to-date drivers to address issues (though there is no FSAA capability with these cards - you need GeForces for that). You can also purchase the GeForce cards, but they may put a higher electrical strain on some older AGP slots that may cause problems (lock ups).

[RDM]

I am getting the same problem with the ancient riverbed. It looks completely black. And when I select a tank unit, it turns *that* color (e.g., the selected border around the tank is yellow, the riverbed turns yellow).

I have a Voodoo3 16MB card. I believe that I'm using the 1000 x 700 resolution. I will try the 800 x 600 resolution to see if it makes a difference.

[RDM]

Originally posted by RDM:

I have a Voodoo3 16MB card. I believe that I'm using the 1000 x 700 resolution. I will try the 800 x 600 resolution to see if it makes a difference.

Yep, Schrullen, you were right. Once I switched to a lower resolution, the lower elevations of the riverbed had the correct textures. Thanks.

[ September 05, 2002, 11:53 PM: Message edited by: RDM ]

[Schrullenhaft]

I tested the Trident 9880, but I got mixed results.

Under WinME (and the same should be true for Win9x I assume) I duplicated the white tiles at the bottom of the ancient riverbed. The same thing that happened on the Voodoo 3 at 1024x768. Unfortunately I was running at 800x600, so a lower resolution wouldn't be able to fix this problem. I was using the latest driver from the Trident Microsystems website and I tried PowerStrip 3.26, but it didn't change anything. I also ran into another problem, but I'm not sure if it is just some funky leftover from the previous video card (a Voodoo Banshee) or if the Trident definitely suffers this problem: The initial 2D screens wouldn't refresh properly. I would have to resort to clicking around the screen and/or Alt-Tab'ing to get the 2D screen to come up.

Under Windows 2000 (and this may be true of WinXP too) the white tiles disappeared at 800x600, probably because the driver can access system memory for texture storage whereas the Win9x/ME driver can't to my knowledge (I didn't try a higher resolution to see how well this would hold out). This was with the driver that comes with Windows 2000, I didn't try the latest driver to see what differences it may have made.

Neither driver offered transparency support (transparent buildings, smoke ?, etc.). Both of them had the 2D refresh problem that makes it a hassle to get around the initial menus, however there is a bit of a chance that somehow the previous Banshee drivers we're affecting this.

I'm not sure if anything can be done about the '2D refresh' problem. As for the other problems we're probably out of luck since these video cards probably aren't going to see much more support (the newest drivers were from August of 2000).

The only solution I can think of for the 'white tiles' is to get a low-res version (lower than what CMBB provides) of the grass tiles to see if this will help with the video memory issues. Of course this will need to be proportionately scaled to a smaller sized texture.

[ September 10, 2002, 09:36 AM: Message edited by: Schrullenhaft ]