nwg

Folks,

I'm sure you have all seen this effect:



** See horrible LOD4 sprites indicated by green arrows.

KillZoneGB of the TWCenter has kindly replaced the LOD4 sprites with LOD3. Its still not perfect as I suspect there is actually an ETW engine error, but its a lot _lot_ better. Try this mod:

http://www.twcenter.net/forums/attachme ... 1251464751

and put it at the top of your mod list. You will lose a couple of FPS in doing this but I think its worth it to not have your eyes assaulted by the horrible up close blobs!

Moopere

Yes they are shocking, thankfully i have only experienced them on the very lowest graphic settings, i now play on medium with no sprites in sight.

That is curious DJ. I've heard this story before, even KillZone himself says that if he (or we) use Ultra settings for Troops and textures you shouldn't see any sprites .. yet I always see these little buggers. I spend almost all my time at the maximum camera height so I can see more of the field at once and this, I think, is what confuses ETW. I'm high up but not always horizontally very far from the troops and can easily see them transition from nice clean model through to blob within only a few feet of camera distance.

Anyway, the above mod _does_ work about 90% of the time, I think the engine itself still throws a wobbly the other 10% - either that or I'm actually quite sensitive to LOD3 as well arrgghhh!

Moo.

I don't re-call ever seeing these things, thankfully.

Gun, are you serious! They are the bane of my eyeballs. Would you mind reeling off your graphic settings when you get a chance? I must have something set wrong as almost everything looks like crap on my system once I get to about musket range or further. My GPU has got the grunt I just must have it set wrong.

Cheers, M.

I'm not sure what my graphics are set at just now, but I do know they are not at the highest.....I will check next time I log into Empire......but I think my seetings are quite low for everything, as I'm not that bothered by the graphic deatils, but I'm pleased I don't see that mess !.

Here are my sprite proof graphic settings

Good idea Dougie, here's mine.



As I thought, pretty low settings all around.

I've had so many different settings and none seem to make much difference one way or the other so I stopped messing around with them....I will take more interest for LG and hope to have them all on highest !.

Hmm. Thats very interesting. Thanks for posting. I'm using a comparatively high resolution, I wonder if this is causing my grief? I always run at 1600x1050, perhaps the game engine has a bug at higher res and is making rendering errors? I've try 1024x768 and see if the issues goes away.

Moo.

I'm using screen res 1400 X 1050.

I have actually now turned everything down to medium, i had unit detail and particle effects (whatever they are ) on high.

After having a number of 3v3's with large units and no lag, all of a sudden have played two games with shockingly bad lag completely unplayable, so bad that i cant see that turning settings down a bit more will have any effect ??
Looks like i will have to play 3v3 on medium unit size, which is not to everybody's liking but i have little choice it seems.

Eeks. Whats going on there do you think? Are you using the GPU memory hack trick thing I posted at NWG? If so (and I do) be careful you don't overload your texture memory by putting too many things on high or ultra. The trick tells the game you have 512MB or more of GPU memory but in reality some of us have less, for me only 256MB, so what happens is that if you bump your settings up too high you start to cause texture memory to swap out of the graphics card (!!!!!!) and this took me from 20-25FPS down to 10. Nowadays I keep unit skins on Ultra and everything else low or off (if possible). Keep AA and AF turned down too as these gobble up texture memory I believe.

I've formed a belief based upon nothing at all that this coming patch will be the last one this year and probably the last major one ever. I reckon we'll see a compatibility patch for ETW when NTW comes out but otherwise this 1.4 patch is probably going to be it. Given this belief then, I'm hoping they clean up all or most of the dangling loose ends, including several really serious rendering engine issues and performance problems. Heres hoping eh?

Cheers, M.

Ok, finally got around to testing the theory - instead of running at 1680x1050 and suffering blobs I thought I'd try 1440x900 ... alas, still blobs! Arrgh! I hate them:



I can't understand why I'd be getting these and others not. Do you guys sit far back from your troops (via the camera) or do you tend to be up close?


Moo.

I don't go in close very often, mostly from well above and behind my men.

I have changed my graphics to higher detail settings and the maps look so different - and better !.

I am still using the trick you posted here at the NWG, but like G24 i view things from a distance and as i said before no horrible Sprites as long as I'm not on very low graphics settings.

Its all a black art this stuff I swear. I fiddle constantly because some settings which make a big visual difference don't seem to affect FPS even in the slightest way (the bottleneck being elsewhere obviously). For me though, on two machines, one with an Nvidia 8600GT and the other with a 9800GT the blobs seem here to stay unless I use a LOD trick as in the OP. Sigh.... I'd hoped that CA would have noticed this by now and fixed the issue, but I guess if only a few people suffer it then its not an easy thing to track down.

Moo