Weird Graphics Problems

[The Renegade]

Hey all you waterlogged kaleuns. I have yet another set of problems and questions, this time concerning quirky little graphic problems I have been noticing.

The first problem (there are two), and the one I have noticed for a longer time, concerns the water. It's hard to explain non-visually, but I'll try. Basically, around my sub and other ships, the water is fine. Then, at some certain point, the water begins to look like crap. It is no longer the ultra-realistic water that I have come to love in SH3. It's this jaggy, almost two-dimensional flatness. There's a circle of normal looking water around ships and such, but then outside this circle, it turns to crap. I'll post a pic to see if that will help demonstrate the change in water I've been seeing:



My version of SH3 is patched to 1.4b, and I'm running GW 1.1a and SH3 Commander 2.6. I'm not entirely sure, but I think I started to notice this when I installed Grey Wolves. I'm thinking it may be connected to the atmosphere mods (I currently have the 16km light installed), but again, I'm not sure. My computer is a Pentium 4 3.0 Ghz, and I have a Radeon X800 XL, 1GB of RAM, and a 250GB hard drive.

My second problem is more recent. It also concerns the water, although this time, it is in the "good circle" around all moving ships that I see. It also happens whenever the water meets the land. Right at any given ship's waterline, the water seems to flicker and stutter wherever it touches the ship's hull. I've tried to take pics, but when I look at them, they look normal, so I'm thinking it may have to do with my monitor, which is new. It's an LCD, and the native resolution is 1280 by 1024, so that may be why, since SH3 runs in 1024 by 768, but I never noticed it on my old monitor, which was also set to 1280 by 1024, but it was a CRT. Actually, I guess I don't have much of a clue with this one. I've never had this "flickering water" before this past week, and it puzzles me.

I have heard rumors that you can run SH3 in higher resolutions, so if that is true (or false), I'd be very happy to know about it.

So if anyone has any words of advice, this skipper would be ecstatic, because he is very frustrated, as these graphics problems are distracting and take away from the gameplay experience.

And here's a pic of the second problem, even though it looks normal. However, you can kinda see it a little where the water meets the land. It's not really flickering, but that's kinda what the water looks like when it meets the ships hull. And yes, that destroyer did beach himself there on his own accord. He was too excited to come DC me I guess. Thought he could steam right through anything. Including that hunk of land.



Note: You can also see that crap water in the background of the second image.

[kiwi_2005]

I get both those problems too, yet i just put up with it, but i do know before i installed GW i never had it. My horizon water mark is pink? Close up around my boat the water looks nice, the further out it starts to look blocky and real far its pink And im using no other graphic mods

I think it could be our PC's cannot handle it:hmm:

2.4
1gig ram
6800 256ram

Mods - GW, SH3Cdr 2.6, Anzacs sound mod

[enaceo]

Hello there!
Ok,so the first problem.Well that's not actually a "problem" I think.It is probably related to the atmosphere mod.That ****ty water you see -it is a "low-poly" representation of water that is displayed after long ranges to reduce lag.However,it shouldn't really be that close to the camera...maybe it's a bug in the atmosphere mod?(i use the standart 8km one and I don't have the problem)
About the second problem,well,I can't really see what's wrong on the ship's hull,but that "Flickering" you get near land is probably because of the crap "colision" mapping between water and land.I get it too and weirdly enough i got something smiliar in IL-2(another great Ubisoft game).It's probably engine-related so you shouldn't worry about that.Hope this helps!

Edit: kiwi_2005 It's impossible that this is a PC problem.My PC is only slightly better than yours (I have AMD 2500+XP also called Barthon I think ,but it runs at almost 2ghz so it get's really hot but the extra power is welcome -1 gig DDR and 6600GT and I don't really get the problem.

[The Renegade]

Thanks to kiwi_2005 and enaceo for the helpful replies. After reading them, I started to look at some of my early screenshots, back when I first started with GW, and the water quality was vastly greater. I also think that during that time, I was using the standard 8km atmosphere mod, so I am going to change back to that and see if it helps. It might fix the flickering as well. And what enaceo said about the land/water deal made sense, so that's solved.

But I really hope that this isn't a PC problem. It would not make my day.

Kiwi, you have a pink horizon?!? And I was annoyed with crappy water...that would drive me nuts!

Seriously though, that is very odd. Hopefully it's just the sunlight or something.

And enaceo, yeah, that second screenshot doesn't show the flickering, but it is very noticeable in the game. That was probably the more irritating of the two problems, just because I had just started noticing it was there. Like it just decided to show up, after all those "flicker-free" hours of gameplay. That pissed me off.

[enaceo]

Glad to see my advice helped!And Kiwi,like The Renegade said,it is most likely the sun that's causing it.Oh and I remember there was a thread not long ago with someone who managed to run the game on an MX GFX card .You should see those screenshots...

[kiwi_2005]

I think i'll go back to 8km. Being using 16km light

[torpcatcher]

Hey,

I once encountered the point at which weather changes. So that’s what happens…
First the sky textures on the dome become choppy and look like twisted mirror images and than few minutes later the weather changes. It happened to me while I was pounding a patrol boat by English shore . I was chasing it and than it happen. I had a clear weather, and than puff and nice fog came out of no where. My visibility was reduced to 700m, got to love the British weather.

[kiwi_2005]

UPDATE: I went back to 8km and now the pink line in the horizon is no more I think my card just can't handle very well 16km option. Sea detail looks better in 8km.
On another note i just had one of the best convoy attacks ever! Thanks to GW. Oct 1941 VIIC, In BF grid pitch black, i came across a convoy with approx 12 ships not quite sure as it was so dark i could only see like 2 feet in front of me. I attacked on the surface and was ready to hit the crash dive if any siteing of escorts but there was none All ships lights came on and boy if there were escorts i would of been a sitting duck myself, but i only came across an armed merchant that started firing at me when i got to close, went to periscope depth and sunk her too with 2 torps left I decided to leave the area and make my way to Bassel to meet up with a milkcow. I sunk 6 ships. Probably the best successful nite attack ive had in ages.

[Baseline]

Greetings,

Another possible cause is your Anisotropic Filter settings. Low settings will reduce the "good circle" while higher ones will make it larger at the expense of frame rates, depending on your equipment. This is often times most noticeable in FPS games where the "good circle" isnt a circle at all but instead a half of a circle.

What is going on here is how the textures are loaded to your video card. Textures that are far away are rendered as lower res textures than those up close. Anisotropic Filtering is like Anti Aliasing in that it can help reduce textures jagged lines but Anisotropic Filtering does this without blurring the texture. It is most helpful on textures that are at angles and distances like the seas in SHIII.

Anisotropic Filtering and AA are really concesions to video cards that lack the power to render these textures at high resolutions with smooth frame rates. Perhaps in a couple years when GPUs become dual and quad core as well as being equipped with the required memory and memory bandwidth availability these will no longer be needed.

Hope this helps.

[frog7]

i get this two...but i dont mind....

[GT182]

Just as a line of reference, I'm running a GF5600Ultra 256mb card, P4 3.2, a Hyundai L90D 19" LCD, and 2 sets of 2 matched 512mb sticks of PC3200 DDR RAM for total of 2 gigs. I'm also using the 16km mod but not GW as of yet. Also my SHIII is patched to 1.4( as all should be), 62 mods installed, SHIII Commander installed and running my career.

This computer is about 18 months old but not showing any graphics problems like Renegade and Kiwi are having. Using 16km or 8km should not affect things. It's not the game but the settings you are using for the hardware you are running.

The resolution I'm running for all my games is 1152x864 and 32 bit color quality. Baseline, has a handle on it with Anisotropic Filtering and Anti Aliasing. Check your cards and see if they're on or off. My AF and AA are Application-controlled for both. Image is set to Quality and Verticle Sync is also Application-controlled. My max res is 1280 by 1024.

As a side note, it might help if you have problems to post your DX dialog, as that will show where your problems are. And it's proof whether it's the game or hardware.

[enaceo]

GT182 has a good point there -make sure the AA and AO are set to "App controlled" in the settings-that could cause a lot of problems.

[Vorperblad]

After reading your comments, and having a bit of a hunt for the answer, I took some screenshots of my graphic-glitch.
I have a toshiba Sattpro. It runs 2.4Dualcore, 2gigsDDR2 - with 256mb intel graphic accelerator (Dx10 running) for the shaders.
Now mine doesn't have the 16km atmosphere turned on, and AA +AO is both run by application. I think It might indicate only that the LCD screen is causing this.

---------------------------------------------------
Basic Mod list
- GWX 2.1 w/minor fix's 26thApril, Mission Orders, Renown Replacement, Warning Orders, Integrated Orders, Enhanced Damage Effects, No medals.
- Officer Icons
- Church Obs per GWX 2.0 (Int.Orders)
- Periscopes TDC 1.2
- SRM02 - Opt. for GWX enhanced damage effects
- Fuel Economy Mod v1.2
- TypeII Lights
- Liftboats&Debris v3b
- Small freighter mast fix
- Tomsens sound pack v3
- LRT 2.02 with SRM compatability patches
-------------------------------------------------
As I turn the view towards the sun, I get a colour bend across the ocean. The ocean flickers constantly, even at night. It's pretty bad on the eyes.

Here's some screenies below.


It flickers in and out.

A band of colour captured in between the flickering from dark to light. I turn the view and this light "bends"

Again...

Even at night. The flickering DIDN'T save this Merchant Captain!

So you see... it's an interesting anomaly.
Has anyone else seen this? If so what's the solution?

[Giezer1984]

In my laptop i have a option at the NVIDIA control panel (manage 3d settings) to put Anti Aliasing mode off. This solved the problem for me. I dont have the weird reflections anymore.

[Sailor Steve]

While we appreciate the attempt to help, you might want to take a look at the dates before answering a thread that hasn't been posted in for seven years. The person who started the thread hasn't even visited SubSim in four years, so it's unlikely he'll see this.