What happend?

[scupking]

I got 1.4b and all the cool smoke effects and fire don't seem to happen very much. I had no problmes when I had 1.2 installed. These are my system specs.

6800 GT 256MB
1.5GB RAM
3.0 GHz P4 Northwood

[ShipperS7]

I'm sorry, I usually know this kind of stuff but I have no earthly idea why it would reduce effects on a system like yours, unless you were running 3rd-party AA or AF... :hmm:

[iambecomelife]

I got 1.4b and all the cool smoke effects and fire don't seem to happen very much. I had no problmes when I had 1.2 installed. These are my system specs.

6800 GT 256MB
1.5GB RAM
3.0 GHz P4 Northwood

I know that some NVIDIA cards (especially with the latest drivers) distort the smoke and fire graphics or display them as white; try using older drivers for your card.

[scupking]

Yeah, its very strange. Im running the sim at 8xS AA and the game looks and runs as good as it has in 1.2 but for some reason it just seems like smoke effects are missing. I hit a ship with a torp. and theres the exsplosin but then no smoke after that. The ships will sink but with not much if any smoke coming off them. I can see smoke from ships smoke stacks and buildings. I don't no maybe its just me but for some reason 1.4bs effects dosn't seem as good as 1.2s. Do you guys think it has to do with the Nvidia partical fix in 1.4b? What I might do is just uninstall the sim and delet all my missions and start from scratch. That might fix it.

[Duncan Idaho]

A reinstall is unlikely to fix it, it's a dastardly bug. You may also have lost Sun Glare at the same time. (Sun will just be a pinkish yellow disk with no glare).

There's a fix that allows you to run the game in higher resolutions under WinXP and another for WinXP with Service Pack 2. If you do this fix and run at higher res, you can get sun glare back, (I have sun glare again, finally, running the game in 1280x1024). Here's a link to the Resolution fix in the SH3 Community Manual in case you're interested:

http://www.communitymanuals.com/shiii/index.php?title=Display_Resolution

For smoke, I've had good luck alt-tabbing out of the game, and right back into the game to restore normal smoke. Problem is, sun/moon glare (and some other things) will then just kill the smoke, but I've found if I alt-tab in and out of the game quickly while looking at the moon or sun, then smoke will stay. Strange, but it works for me every time.

May seem like voodoo, but there ya go.