Texture quality, dark splotches

[junspud 1,066]

I've been trying to figure out why I have this odd graphics issue for a long time now;

While I was editing the terrain exemplars in Reader I saw a bunch of exemplars relating to shadows and lighting which intrigued me because I've always assumed this was some weird shadow rendering issue.

I'm still new to Reader and exemplars so I was kind of just messing around and seeing if changing any of the values had any impact on this splotch issue. I don't believe it did, but I was probably doing it wrong anyway.

Then I realized, changing the texture quality doesn't resolve the issue but does have some sort of effect, no other settings seem to have any influence;

You can still see splotches, but they're different shapes and in different locations.

The splotches disappear if no light is being cast where they would be, I didn't mention, the splotches are always in the same location and the same shape;

 

You can see the splotches under the streetlight, but not the stop sign.

Changing the shadow quality from medium or high to low temporary produces this result;

The shadows or splotches or whatever they're supposed to be persist until the tile is refreshed by zooming in and out.

So I was wondering if anyone had any insight into why this is happening and what's going on?

[rsc204 21,805]

Best guess your graphics somewhere, most likely the drivers, can't properly support the implementation SC4 uses for generating shadows. You could try other driver revisions, an older driver may work better, that said by two NVidia cards both work fine with SC4, although they aren't the latest tech by any means. SC4 is based on DirectX 7 and requires at least DirectX 9.0c compatibility to work as intended, if your GPU can't do this, you might look here for using emulation for compatibility instead:

https://community.simtropolis.com/forums/topic/758939-SimCity-4-does-not-want-to-run-on-the-gpu/?do=findComment&comment=1727097

[junspud 1,066]

On 3/15/2020 at 5:08 PM, rsc204 said:

Best guess your graphics somewhere, most likely the drivers, can't properly support the implementation SC4 uses for generating shadows. You could try other driver revisions, an older driver may work better, that said by two NVidia cards both work fine with SC4, although they aren't the latest tech by any means. SC4 is based on DirectX 7 and requires at least DirectX 9.0c compatibility to work as intended, if your GPU can't do this, you might look here for using emulation for compatibility instead:

https://community.simtropolis.com/forums/topic/758939-SimCity-4-does-not-want-to-run-on-the-gpu/?do=findComment&comment=1727097

I think you're right, if it's not any known universal issue I guess it's probably the drivers themselves, I've tried every version I can find and none have fixed it. I appreciate the support on this as you've answered practically this same question from me a number of times in my effort to find a solution lol. Emulation must be the only solution.

I do have kind of an unrelated question but I don't feel starting an entirely new thread for this makes much sense so I'll ask here..

 

Is this normal or does it point towards a corrupted simicty2 dat file or something? Happens when just the base game directories are loaded as well. I couldn't find anything relevant by looking up some of the IDs on SC4 Tool.

Also happens after replacing the Simcity1.dat with one from a reinstall.. I wonder because every other time I see this black box it's from a missing dependency.

[rivit 3,391]

I don't know PIMx so this may be fine.

~~~~~

Given you've done the driver checks without result, here are some things I would check in rising nerd order.

• Do you get these shadow artefacts in a completely vanilla SC4?

• Do you still get them when you've turned shadows down to low in options.?

• Will the game run properly in Graphics High setting  (this is notoriously expensive) ?

• Have you examined the logfile in the installation folder of SimCity/Apps? Its called 'MachineName'-config-log.txt. This file details what SC4 thinks your machine environment consists of and what settings are best - does it recognise and rate your graphics card correctly? Are your options settings consistent? 

• Is your gfx card in the Video Cards.sgr  files? - to be found in the SC4 install folder.

• Does the Graphics Rules.sgr file correctly process the card type.?

[CorinaMarie 29,569]

2 hours ago, junspud said:

Is this normal . I wonder because every other time I see this black box it's from a missing dependency.

This one I know the answer to.

Yes, what you see there is normal. Here's mine:

 

I've also extracted every single texture from all the original .dat files and using @rivit's GoFSH program, converted them all to .BMPs so I could see them easily. There are actually quite a few textures which are entirely black.

[Raymond7cn 6,772]

Hi Junspud, @junspud I learnt all FSH relevant tricks from Cori's splendid tutorial with rivit's great tools here:

I hope it could help you there, Looking forward more of your beautiful CJ my friend.

Yours Sincerely,

-- Raymond

[rsc204 21,805]

12 hours ago, CorinaMarie said:

There are actually quite a few textures which are entirely black.

Such textures are typically used as shadows in-game, they can be applied partially (with transparency) on top of other textures/models.