Stripes on buildings

[Komodo82 0]

Hi, friends.

I need your help with SimCity 4 bug: After installing mods I have got vertical and horisontal stripes on many buildings.

Please, help me to get rid of it.

Thank you in advance.

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

This is very likely due to a set up problem with your GPU and the game.  If you haven't done it, you may need to edit a couple of files in the system residency.  You might find some useful information in this thread: https://community.simtropolis.com/forums/topic/33931-how-to-configure-sc4-to-work-with-your-new-hardware/ but no guarantee. 

If those buildings have HD textures, this could be a matter of the resolution you have set.

Is the problem endemic, or only on some structures?

[Komodo82 0]

The problem is only on some buildings (big one) and is not constant on some buildings

Thanks for the link - I will read it

[Komodo82 0]

A Nonny Moose

I have done everything, but the problem stays (

Also I see that it doesn't depends on mods and when zooming out or maximum in it disappears.

[rsc204 21,805]

This issue has been brought up again and again, I'm sorry to tell you but it may simply not be fixable.

You see SC4 was made at a very different time in terms of the hardware it was designed to support. The more modern your equipment and drivers, the more likely that little incompatibilities will be an issue.

At the heart of the problem is an incompatibility between your GPU and drivers, which can cause this "banding" effect to occur on some buildings.

Possible solutions include trying a different driver for your videocard, perhaps even out of date drivers, which sometimes support legacy features removed in newer drivers.
Note: Installing out of date drivers might be good for SC4, but likely won't be for newer software.

Otherwise you may find by adjusting the 3D settings (NVidia Control Panel / ATI Catalyst), you are able to get better results. Unfortunately such settings are a minefield, so the best advice I can give is some trial and error with the available settings. Personally I did this with my 3 year old NVidia card and found a place with a happy balance between some very minor issues but with good performance and most issues averted.

[Komodo82 0]

 

rsc204

Thanks, I will try changing drivers and video card settings.

 

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

If you have the proper drivers, you might try running with OpenGL.  The option is -d:opengl.  You could also try software rendering ( -d:software).  If you use any of these, removing it is insufficient to turn it off.  To get back to directX you need to use -d:directx at least once to reset the configuration file.

[Komodo82 0]

 

A Nonny Moose

thx. In software mode everything is good, but this mode is too slow (

I will continue to make directx to work as good as software rendering.

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

Well, I suspected as much.  Software mode ignores your GPU driver and only uses the GPU as a frame buffer.  This eats the CPU, of course, so you can expect that things would be quite a bit slower.  At least now you know why things are that way, and need to find a solution within the hardware/software combination you have.

When in doubt, I generally try software rendering.  I have scripts that will start the game in any of the three options.

[Komodo82 0]

The bug is solved !!! Uraaaa )

You should raise (make higher) antialiasing in Nvidia settings.

Here is a screen http://c2n.me/3ws0DhB

Thank you my friends !

[rsc204 21,805]

Well what you've done, is not so much solve the problem as hide it. Because Anti-Aliasing is post processing. So in essence, you GPU is messing with the picture you get on your display. If that's managing to resolve the issue to your satisfaction, that's great.

But my card is set to full anti-aliasing, for me this doesn't entirely illuminate the issue. See here, this was discussed recently, seems the issue is endemic to SC4. So perhaps don't be surprised if the issue pops up again.

[Odainsaker 2,133]

16 hours ago, rsc204 said:

But my card is set to full anti-aliasing, for me this doesn't entirely illuminate the issue. See here, this was discussed recently, seems the issue is endemic to SC4. So perhaps don't be surprised if the issue pops up again.

I think that thread may involve a somewhat different type of glitch, as the slipping seams and fault lines there seem to zigzag at sharp angles following the triangulation of the underlying meshes.  If you look carefully, you can see those zigzag slip seams in Komodo82's image, however, the vertical and horizontal stripes Komodo82 actually pointed out instead are peculiarly orthogonal in conveniently 256x256 blocks of pixels, as if following some display grid like you might see with distributed rendering.  I might hazard a guess that perhaps these indeed come from something like a distributed or parallel rendering glitch among maybe the GPU's core, threads, or batches, where some quirk of hardware, drivers, settings, and ancient game software does not process the distributed pieces back together seamlessly.  Yeah, that sounds good, hehe!  Actually, it also sort of looks like a mipmapping seam, and while those seams more commonly are seen in plane with the textured 3D geometry, we know SimCity 4 uses an old and funky 2.5D scheme to partially fake 3D in billboard fashion with a fixed camera, creating all sort of quirks.  Who knows...?

I've actually seen this glitch before in other games, though I don't fully remember where or how they were resolved.  The only example I could dig up through searching comes from a thread on TrainSim.com where a player two years ago had a similar problem with Microsoft Train Simulator inside a cab model that has a pinned camera.  Like Komodo82, posters in that thread ultimately settled on a workaround of changing their anti-aliasing and texture filtering settings, which they specifically accomplished for their game by adjusting Nvidia settings while also editing their program shortcut's properties to add custom switches.  As long as it works...

 

[Jasoncw 11,840]

So the way that BATs work is the renders are broken into multiple .FSH files which are overlaid on the 3d model of the building. If you open a .SC4Model file in the Reader and you look through all the .FSH files you'll see how they're divided.

The gaps in your screenshot look like the gaps that happen between the .FSH slabs sometimes. This actually happens in everyone's game sometimes, as long as you're looking hard enough you can find it. But for most people it doesn't happen enough to be a problem. 

Your graphics card is newer than the ones that the game was designed for. The game was designed so that the .FSH files would fit together perfectly without any seams with the expected graphics cards from the time. 

I don't know practical ways about how to fix it but that's my guess at what the problem is.

[A Nonny Moose 8,261]

The game is getting a little long in the tooth.  As hardware becomes less legacy compatible we can expect more glitches of this kind.