I might have found the cause for the black textures on AMD GPUs, need help solving the problem

[Tonci87 3]

Hi there, 

as many of you are aware, the game has a problem when played on a PC with an AMD graphics card. Rivers and towns appear with big, blocky black textures.

Let me start this post with two pictures to show you, that this can be changed!

This is how the rivers look in my unmodded BH&H installation: 

(Season summer, clear skies, Marne region, above le Chatelet, looking west)

And this is how they look after I made a change:

 

Now that I have your attention, let me explain what I did to arrive at that point, where the root cause for the issue is and how it might be solved. 

Premise: The game has an issue with a very specific set of textures (rivers and towns/cities), while all other textures work just fine.

This means that there is something present that causes this issue for those textures, but not for all others.

If that something can be removed or fixed, all textures should work fine.

 

Method: Identify the root issue by picking apart how this old engine handles textures. 

Polovski asked me to test if saving the DDS Texture files in a newer format would fix the issue, sadly that did not work, but it got me poking a bit deeper.

I tried replacing the river affiliated DDS Texture files inside \WOFF\WOFFScenery\Seasons\Summer with renamed Wildgrass1summer.dds textures to test if the DDS texture was even responsible for the issue.

I though it might have something to do with how the water is displayed, maybe a reflection effect not working.

I was surprised to see this:

 

Clearly the river DDS textures were not the issue, since the Wildgrass DDS texture, that is working fine across the whole map, is now displaying the same behavior when used instead of the river textures.

But this showed me, that the game seems to builds the map out of square shaped tiles.

Because you don´t want to have a map that looks like a chessboard, composed of square shaped tiles (see the image above), the DDS textures contain an alpha channel, that makes a part of the texture tile transparent.

This leaves the part you want to see visible, to blend with the general seasonal texture. That is why, In the image above, where I replaced the river DDS Textures with another DDS texture that only has transparent edges, it appears square shaped.

 

The Tutorial on how to create an airfield mod for WOFF within the WOFF Modding tools and tutorials available on this website here: https://www.thatoneplease.co/toolsWOFF.html pointed me to another set of texture files that exits in this game engine: .MOS (mosaic) files.

I don´t fully understand what .mos files are and how they are used by this engine. The Tutorial doesn´t explain this well enough.

I only know that the DD texture files are used to build a .MOS file for that texture.

But when I replaced the river affiliated .mos files inside \WOFF\OBDWW1 Over Flanders Fields\assets\WW1MOS with renamed 006Wildgrasssummer1.mos files, this is the result that I got:

You can see that the game applies the correct tile shape/transparency, suggesting that that is taken from the DDS Texture.

Only the part of the texture that otherwise would have been black is now showing the Wildgrass texture, suggesting that the actual texture on display is taken from the .mos file.

 

Conclusion:

The .mos files for rivers, towns and cities are at fault for the black texture problem.

 

Next steps:

Try to rebuild/fix/replace the affected .mos files

 

Problem:

I still don´t have a clue what .mos files are, or which program can be used to manipulate them. GIMP or other programs suggested by a google search can´t open those files.

I can not find the program that is shown in the modding tutorial.

Can anybody enable me to edit .mos files by pointing me to a program that can open them?

Can anybody share with me what .mos files are and how the game engine is using them? 

Edited November 11 by Tonci87
typo

[+VonS 1,424]

Hello Tonci, excellent catch there with those strange .mos files -- perhaps that will be the ticket for using newer versions of the AMD DLLs with the WoFF series. Here's hoping that it all pans out well.

In terms of .mos files themselves, I haven't researched how the WoFF (CFS3) engine actually uses them, but .mos usually refers to "Leaf camera raw file" (i.e., raw camera binary format developed by Leaf Imaging). To convert .mos files to other image formats, check over the program called Filestar* (the free version seems capable enough --- see this link).

NOTE: see Pol's response below mine -- the .mos files used in the WoFF series are not raw image files, but instead data files that control texture overlays and other related details. (Thanks Pol for the clarification.)

Cheers,

Edited November 12 by VonS
Added important info.

[+Polovski 460]

It's not a graphic file VonS.  It's a file designed to define aspects of textures and overlays of textures.  Aircraft use them too to allow damage decals to be placed over it when hit etc.

I can't help in detail at the moment, but a MOS Editor is called surprisingly MOSEditor ;), and in ye olde CFS3 Aircraft and Vehicle SDK. It will also need a fix file on Windows 10 /11, and also be set to run in compatibility mode for Win XP. If you get Mos editor, send me a PM and I can send the fix file.

The mod  on Mike's site you pointed to https://www.thatoneplease.co/toolsWOFF.html  contains the SDK inside the mod BTW so you have the MOS editor.
Mos stands for Mosaic

Edited November 12 by Polovski

[Tonci87 3]

Update:
Saving the river dds textures in DDS3 format and then creating new .mos files with those dds textures, did unfortunately not change the black rivers....

[Tonci87 3]

Conclusion and new Hypothesis

I think I know why exchanging the river MOS files for renamed grass files produced the result without the black textures, and why rebuilding the river MOS files did not produce the desired result.

While tinkering with the MOSEditor and the MOS files, I noticed that when loading an existing MOS file into the editor it would also try to load the corresponding textures, and produce errors if I didn´t point the editor to the locations of the dds files beforehand.

It seems that the purpose oft he Editor is to create a MOS file, that will blend multiple texture files and their ALPHA masks. What the Edior does not do, is to define the properties of the texture files, like for example glossines, reflectiveness, etc. 

The renamed wildgrass MOS file was able to produce the result without black textures, because it was still calling on the wildgrass dds texture file, instead of the river texture file.

New theory: I need to find the files in which the game defines how a texture will be rendered in the game.

How does it work with aircraft? Where are properties such as glossines and reflectiveness of the surface textures defined?