Why the water is so black?

[MJDixon]

I had the issue with the green textured distant water as well (on XPSP3 as well) - but managed to sort it while trying to increase FPS, as when I changed the Forest setting to Very Low the sea went back to normal (Forest setting was previously set to low.)

Presumably it's some sort of tree based texture error? (Would explain why it's green I suppose.)

Of course the only problem now is there are no trees.

[Space Communist]

I am thinking you guys might want to try an OS that wasn't released a decade ago.

[Col.Flanders]

Originally Posted by Space Communist

I am thinking you guys might want to try an OS that wasn't released a decade ago.

Is XP stated as being below min spec?

If not, why should there be a problem?

[Meek]

GF 9800GTX+ is below minimum requirements, it's probably missing support for a shader that the water needs to render properly, if that is indeed the case, you should consider yourself lucky that you can even play at all.

[Stonehouse]

Thanks for the responses. I'd go along with the 'old OS' and 'old card" point of view except that as Col.Flanders mentioned XP SP3 is part of the min requirement set and as I recall for min requirements the graphics card simply had to be fully Direct 9 compliant with more than 512 mb vram. The 9800GTX+ is both of those and I have never expected great performance with my current PC or GPU but did expect not to have graphics corruptions with low settings.

In any case I've done some further work and sent my conf.ini to a friend with Win 7 and med-high GTX card. He found that he had exactly the same issue as me when using my conf.ini. The only significant difference between the two appears to be the render method. When he edited my conf.ini and changed the render method to D3D10_0 the "green" sea problem went away. He also tried his own conf.ini and edited that changing the render method to D3D9 - he then saw the same "green" sea issue again.

Several others at SimHQ, not realising that I had to leave things D3D9 suggested I should edit the render method to D3D10 as that would fix the issue as it had worked for them.

I could be entirely wrong but I think this indicates there is a problem either with the D3D9 graphics rendering or perhaps a clash with the game and the driver.

Cheers,
Stonehouse

[damar]

solved.

edit conf.ini

Render=D3D10_0

water=-1

MSAA=1
MeshStatics=1 ---->must =1
MeshStaticsDetail=1---->must =1

[Stonehouse]

Thanks Damar. Someone else advised switching off trees and that has worked for me. I can't use D3D10 but I'll try the MSAA and MeshStatics settings and see if it will let me get trees back with blue water.