Hi when the Mofo update came out I noted that something was not right with the way foliage rendered i.e. it was often times too dark. I made a posting in the mega bug thread with screenshots (might wanna check this out aswell).
Anyways I looked into it a fair bit more and discovered that it’s not so simple infact it seems that my GPU (ATI HD6850 old stuff I know) is not rendering normalmaps and or lightmaps correctly.
To illustrate the problem let me show you some side by side comparsions the left side shows screencaps from the Mofo showcase vids, while the right side is a screencap from my game on super settings.
Note how the textures have a 3d pop to it and the side and the pipe thing in the background shows some specular reflection.
Same on Trainyard, stonetextures reflection on the pipe not visible and you can see the blackend leafs that made me look at the map a bit harder in the first place.
Tilefloor to the right is the same, but more important ugly black spots on the mud texture (lightmap bugging out? ).
once again notice the groundfloor and more black spotted lightmap on the stone arc window texture.
speaking of lightmaps bugging out. notice how well defined the triangular walls are on the left.
Now you might say well, you got a old ass GPU no wonder it can’t handle “Super” settings. However it’s not so simple.
Take a look at this one.
notice how there is a reflection near the minimap because the ground is supposed to be wet?
Reflections are still there they just don’t show up where they supposed to.
And more important reducing the settings only helps partial, granted removing highquality material will kinda take care of the normalmaps and specular highlights, since it will not render them at all. But the misaligned lightmaps still present on minimal.
less obvious but dark blotches still present.
The lack of normalmapping reduces the effect by a large margin but on the triangular wall bit in the front the maligned lightmap is still present.
So why am I showing this. Well I’m playing DB since the beta stresstests and never noticed those errors however I checked older vids of mine (as far back as march this year) and they also show this behaviour.
There is a good chance that other people are effected aswell. And it would be imo a good thing if you all check some of the locations I showed here and see if it is fine for you or not (MG chapel is propably the easiest).
Maybe we can see how widespread it is, and wether it is limited to a certain gpu brand/series/generation.
For the Devs anyone interested the imgur album with a couple more comparsion shots
and Zorla for hinting me in the direction of obscure config settings.