Help with not so great RHW / HD image quality?

[panerai1 27]

Not my area of expertise so I'll just try to do my best to explain.

 

While doing some testing I noticed a couple of display issues:

 

  1) The white lines on RHW don't display well at higher views (Z1 and Z2?)

 

  2) Certain HD textures (i.e., sidewalks and fillers) where the grout lines appear "dashed"

 

 

So many of you post such beautiful photos that don't seem to have these issues, in particular RHW. I've been reading all I can find on the matter of graphics settings etc. and so far nothing has helped.

 

Maybe these two photos can illustrate:

 

RHW:

 

 

 

Textures (a mix of HD and LD):

 

 

 

 

 

Would appreciate any thoughts.

 

- - -

 

Game settings:

 

  -w -CustomResolution:enabled -r1440x900x32 -f -CPUCount:1   -intro:off

  Hardware rendering

  32-bit

 

 

Computer specs (yeah I know not the best):

 

  Processor Intel Core 2 Duo P8400 2.26 GHz

  Ram 4GB

  Windows Vista Home Premium 32-bit

  Video Card Nvidia GeForce 9600M GS

  Video Driver v310.90 (all options set to "off" or determined by sc4)

  Hard Drive 320GB

  Virtual Memory: 3433 mb

 

 

[A Nonny Moose 8,262]

You have a conflict in your options:

 

  -w -CustomResolution:enabled -r1440x900x32 -f -CPUCount:1   -intro:off

Do you get windowed mode or full screen?

[panerai1 27]

You have a conflict in your options:

 

  -w -CustomResolution:enabled -r1440x900x32 -f -CPUCount:1   -intro:off

Do you get windowed mode or full screen?

 

The game plays in windowed mode with that setting string but yeah I see the mistake in that. What in the world was I thinking. I removed the "-f" with no changes evident.

 

Thank you for noticing that.

 

And since I'm at it again here is another pic of RHW, this time at Z4:

 

 

 

... more dashed lines.

[TPB 563]

I have this same problem and so far have not been able to solve it, I thought it was due to me using software rendering but I see that's not the case..

Could it be the textures themselves? Hopefully someone knowledgeable will come to our aid

[panerai1 27]

I have this same problem and so far have not been able to solve it, I thought it was due to me using software rendering but I see that's not the case..

Could it be the textures themselves? Hopefully someone knowledgeable will come to our aid

 

Regarding the textures, yeah definitely could be. I don't know what I'm doing in photoshop. I was thinking maybe I went too heavy on  contrast or something like that.

 

RHW, on the other hand, was made by sc4 heros. : )

[A Nonny Moose 8,262]

Remember, folks, that the NAM is a work in progress and that some texture problems could easily exist, especially with the vast number of combinations of hardware/software out there.  This problem may very well just disappear on the next NAM iteration.

 

I don't know how many of us are systems/programming people, but the size of this project just staggers my imagination and I've been in the computer game since the 1960s.  The surprising thing is that it works at all, and doesn't fall down from its very mass.  The NAM team is an amazing aggregation of very determined people.

 

Try posting this problem in the NAM support thread This forum is for SimCity 4 problems, not custom content.

[Ganaram Inukshuk 906]

It took me a while to notice it but the white line issue is being caused by the RHW S3D models. We've long since switched over from using mipmaps on S3D models (RKT3) to just using one single texture and one S3D (RKT0), so you'll always get that weird thing.

 

A similar issue can be found on all of the elevated RHWs, diagonal RHWs, and RHW-6S, but that's caused by the S3D settings on those models themselves. It'll always happen, regardless of what graphical setting you're using, and with a lot of NAM components reliant on S3D models, it's unavoidable.

[panerai1 27]

Remember, folks, that the NAM is a work in progress... The NAM team is an amazing aggregation of very determined people.

 

Try posting this problem in the NAM support thread This forum is for SimCity 4 problems, not custom content.

 

 

Correct me if I'm wrong but it seems you may have misunderstood my meaning.

 

Just so we're clear, I have nothing but total respect for the NAM team and am very appreciative of the work they've done.

 

And my apologies for posting this in the wrong section.

[Indiana Joe 1,752]

Nah, you posted this in the correct section. You thought it was a technical bug and you weren't sure if it was specific to the NAM. I know others have had the same question about the aliasing problems with RHW. As Ganaram explained, it is because RHW doesn't use 5 separate textures for each zoom (called mipmaps) like the other transit networks.

Everyone else should have the same effects at far zooms. They may edit it in their screenshots however.

Also I don't know if it's possible for a graphics card to help this issue. A good one with anti-aliasing effects is specifically supposed to help this problem, but I don't know if it would work on an old game like SC4.

I guess all we can ask is, does anyone not have this problem?

[A Nonny Moose 8,262]

It really depends on just how good your GPU is.  I've tried using anti-aliasing effects with SC4 and generally wound up having more problems than it solved.