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

[Tonci87 2]

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 428]

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?