the foliage is all wrong!

[laminar]

Hello, I play Theatre of War on my laptop and my newer desktop.

I have a Geforce 6800 ultra with 175.8 drivers and XP 32bit in my laptop.

I have an ATI 4850 with 9.2 drivers and Vista 64bit in my desktop.

While my laptop struggles to keep up with most battles,

my desktop cruises through everything.

It is awesome except for one area: the leaves on the plants.

For some reason, during spring and winter battles,

the trees on my desktop all look like bare telephone poles until I zoom in very close.

The bushes are practically invisible.

This seems to occur at distances of ~50 meters from the camera.

I might never have noticed this problem,

if I had never played the game first on my laptop, which displays the foliage much better.

Here are a few screen shots:

Desktop:

winter

spring

See how the deciduous trees thin out at a distance?

Then they look like toothpicks far away, while shrubs disappear entirely.

Laptop:

winter

spring

Isn't that much better?

I'm hoping the answer is something simple that I overlooked

(I'm not really planning on buying another video card).

I'm willing to wade into something technical to enjoy this great game a bit more.

Any help is appreciated.

[QuiGon]

I've got exact the same problem like you and hope to find an answer here.

[BigDuke66]

Does it depend on the map?

I see something like this on the last training mission but others looked OK.

[Schrullenhaft]

I'm not sure if I have an answer for you on this or not. It may come down to the video drivers and ATI needing some work. But try this:

In your TOW directory launch the "towsetup.exe". You can also find this within the Start Menu group for TOW as "Configure Theater of War".

The 'System' tab is displayed by default. Check these settings:

Tree Detail: HIGH

Tree Distance: HIGH

High Landscape Detail: checked

I'm guessing that the ATI setup may have different settings for this. If it matches the Nvidia setup, then it may come down to drivers. Older or newer.

[QuiGon]

Those ToW-settings are correct. I haven't played it in the last time, but if I remember correctly then it depends realy on the map. On some maps it isn't so extrem as on other maps and on a few maps it is even allright. But I would like to have all maps allright.