Tonci87 3 Posted November 11, 2024 (edited) 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, 2024 by Tonci87 typo Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
+VonS 1,428 Posted November 12, 2024 (edited) 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, 2024 by VonS Added important info. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
+Polovski 461 Posted November 12, 2024 (edited) 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, 2024 by Polovski 1 Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Tonci87 3 Posted November 22, 2024 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.... Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Tonci87 3 Posted November 25, 2024 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? 1 Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
qqq_linux 0 Posted April 12 Apologies for bringing this back months later, I'm due a new computer, and an AMD graphics card is a possibility, so I'm quite invested in the outcome of your experiments :) Anyway, I was just having a look at the MOS files you discussed above - and I was opening them in a hex editor to read which files they referred to (I can't get the Mos editor to run). I may be completely barking up the wrong tree, but it looks like the river files, and possibly the town files are referring to files which don't seem to exist anywhere. RiverHoriz.mos (and other river ones) refer to a RiverHoriz1_watermask.dds Most of the river files refer to a non-existent "watermask.dds" - i.e. RiverSourceLeft_watermask.dds CitySummer.mos refers to a Village04_winter.dds 134summerTownCentre.mos refers to a eneric_1_outline.dds It's possible, in the Mos editor, it would become apparent that these were just leftover references from when the graphics were made and aren't actually used and don't matter etc, but I thought it was worth mentioning just in case. As far as I can tell, none of those files exist. Is it possible Nvidia cards are showing a missing texture as invisible, and AMD cards are showing a missing texture as a black square? Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
+VonS 1,428 Posted Monday at 08:12 PM (edited) On 4/12/2025 at 3:27 PM, qqq_linux said: [...] It's possible, in the Mos editor, it would become apparent that these were just leftover references from when the graphics were made and aren't actually used and don't matter etc, but I thought it was worth mentioning just in case. As far as I can tell, none of those files exist. Is it possible Nvidia cards are showing a missing texture as invisible, and AMD cards are showing a missing texture as a black square? A sound theory and entirely possible, perhaps worth looking into at any rate - some texture files (or naming conventions) initially available in CFS3 may have disappeared and/or gone missing over the decades, as the WoFF series was developed further and further (see in particular the different terrains/textures in use across various generations of WoFF, such as the older OFF, then original WoFF, then the UE/PE-era, then BH&H2, etc., etc.). The oddity with black river textures showed up, as far as I remember, sometime around 2020 or 2021, give or take a year. So, to conjecture, it may have something to do with a newer generation of terrains in WoFF that showed up around that time and that calls up long-ago-disappeared files, file names, and whatnot; or, it may also have something to do with the generation of AMD DLLs that showed up around 2020; it may also be a combination, of course, of the factors outlined above. I am on the ver. 17.x.x AMD DLLs on my 2013 Mac Pro (2015 refresh, technically) - and have found that these DLLs work best, on AMD, with WoFF. This also requires that the venerable version 1809 of Windows 10 Pro be used. Moving to the latest iterations of Win 10, for example, limits you to the ver. 19.x.x AMD DLLs (or newer); the ver. 19.x.x DLLs barely play well with WoFF - the ver. 20.x.x DLLs (or newer) do not play well - expect to see terrain anomalies if using those. At that stage, you are probably better off running WoFF on team green (i.e., nVidia). Good tweaking to you in the WoFF series, Edited Monday at 08:15 PM by VonS Edited post. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites