Any Chance for fixing the Black City Ground Textures and rivers for AMD GPUs?

[Tonci87 3]

Hi,

I just wanted to ask if there is any chance that a future update (such as the upcoming Expansion) will fix the black ground textures in cities and on rivers, that AMD GPU owners are currently experiencing?

 

I have to admit that having those issues did affect my enjoyment of the sim a bit and I can imagine that other AMD GPU owners would not buy the game because of them, and I´ll have a hard time convincing those of my viewers with AMD GPUs to give this otherwise incredible game a shot .

 

A few additional questions:

1. What makes the own/city and river textures different from the other ground textures present in the game? Why don´t we have, for example black airfields?

2. Following from that question: Is it at all possible to replace the affected town and river textures with other, maybe simpler, textures? Or is it possible to somehow disable the graphical feature affecting those textures?

I would be more than happy to have town and river textures that look worse than envisioned if they at least aren´t black. Maybe an optional patch/mod for AMD users could be made that contains alternative textures or a modified renderer?

3. I didn´t see this issue mentioned regarding Wings over the Reich. Is it present there as well? If not, why? What is different? Aren´t both games based on the same graphics engine?

 

Thank you for your time and dedication.

 

 

[+Polovski 460]

As per the thread I pointed you to last time you queried this, AMD drivers caused this they changed along the way.  We don't have a fix for that, as rivers are treated differently within the engine.

We do not own any AMD GPUs in Dev (and have no funds to buy GPUs/PCs or much free dev time to work on this stuff) but if you have time or someone does these are possibilities .....

1) The textures are pretty standard DDS DTX1 (no alpha).  There are a lot, as each season has a set.  You could limit your testing to Summer only, and open and convert to DDS DXT3 or something to see what happens.  A DTX editor such as DTXBMP (Martin Wright's) can do this.
https://www.mwgfx.co.uk/programs/dxtbmp.htm

However note opening a DDS and then resaving it again, loses quality each time.  So make a master backup to revert to for any tests.

You could download The River Mod by Olham which changed the colours just to show you which files are involved in Rivers.

See Sandbagger's site http://www.thatoneplease.co/WOFF.html. 
on http://www.thatoneplease.co/terrainWOFF.html

If it works then cities would be next ;)

2) There is also an alpha/beta Terrain water mod by Xavier that uses vector rivers that may help with rivers - I have no idea if it fixes the issue with AMD though.  See Sandbagger's WOFF and WOTR Mods site.

I don't see working links at the moment but perhaps someone can post a working link, VonS maybe?
 

 

 

 

[Tonci87 3]

The first thing I noticed today is that the new Expansion was released (congratulations for that).

The second thing I noticed is that I missed your answer to this thread (really sorry for that!!!!)

 

I downloaded the DTX Editor you linked and the River Mod to test if I could get the rivers to work in BHH.

I´d really love to get rid of the black textures problem before I buy the DLC and tarnish the amazing looking 150km horizon view with the black textures.

 

Here is what I did:

Remove all mods

Create a test copy of the river mod

Make a testflight on the Marne Map in summer to confirm that rivers have black textures

Close the game

Open the DTX Editor and load one of the river textures for summer.

Save as DDS DXT3

Repeat for all summer textures

Activate the test mod

Check in the game -> Still black textures

 

What else can I try? (I´ll have notifications for replies activated this time)

Thank you.

Edited October 17 by Tonci87

[+Polovski 460]

Yeah no fix currently. 
The only real answer is buy an NVIDIA GPU.

[Tonci87 3]

That is out of the question considering the current prices and that the next generation of Nvidia GPUs is incoming. Also you can´t ensure that whatever AMD did with their drivers, isn´t something that NVIDIA will do as well at some point. And what then?

I still don´t understand in what way river and city textures are treated differently in this engine from the other textures. Especially when it comes to the city textures, I just don´t see a pattern. The ruined cities for example look just fine, smaller villages as well.

If there is anything else I can try or test, please let me know

[Tonci87 3]

I did a bit of further testing to confirm a suspicion I had. 

First I made a test mod that replaces all summer river textures with renamed copies of the Wildgrass1summer.dds texture, to check if the issue is even connected to the textures themselves 

 

The result can be seen in the attached picture 

 

The river textures have been replaced by grass, but we can still see the irregular black coloring. 

So the issue clearly doesn´t stem from the textures themselves, but from how they are configured or used.

I know little about how this game engine works, but I dug a bit deeper.

In the folder \WOFF\OBDWW1 Over Flanders Fields\terrains are the files determining which textures get loaded by the engine and how they are placed on the map. At least that is my understanding of the files in that folder.

I went ahead and made a testmod that replaces all the landclassmaskRiverXXXX.dds and .xml files with renamed copies of the genericlandclassmaskSomme.dds and .xml file (Screenshot 2024-10-18 223621.jpg).

 

The result looks like this:

 

We see that the shape and size of the tiles has changed to match the settings for the genericlandclassmaskSomme tiles. 

However, we still see the irregular black coloring of many of the tiles.

 

My question now is, what determines this coloring that is applied to the textures? Or in short, what makes the river textures different from, let´s say any other ground texture?

Can we somehow get the game to display the river (and then city) textures in the same way as the other ground textures?

 

Edited October 18 by Tonci87