Some NVidia cards have a few problems with unwanted transparent pixels in GS.

I can’t promise that these will work with your particular iNVidious card:

GS_NVidia textures

There’s only a handful of corrections: a bunch of buildings and close-ups of the hi-res helos.

Havoc before new textures:


Havoc after new textures:



Usually, I only see those yellow ovals while on a protracted mushroom binge. If you see them frequently, you may want to consult a physician.

Nice! That must have taken some time, but it looks great!

Ya know, between all the incredible work done by you, PSYKLIK, WB, Polak and others, there really is enough new stuff for a new patch.

Take care of that, will you? And then AFTER lunch, ...

Firing up GS! last night, it looked great, after moving back to the latest 181.22 driver and using the no_cd beta2 exe (but also trying the patched to 1.2 UK edition exe). Can run in 1920 highest resolution. Ran horribly with the old 169.22 Nvidia - 7 fps! And looked bad, to boot.

BUT - when selecting "N" for the in game map view, INSTANT CTD. With either stock or community exe. Has anyone else had this problem? Any suggestions to remedy? It did happen with the old 169.21 driver, prior to chganging to the new driver.

@samovar6
great work. I thought that those breaks in the model were caused by faulty display of the 3D models from old games by new graphic drivers. How did you accomplished the masking - by decrease area occupied by the transparent pixels on the texture?

@Eugene
dance with new drivers on the old game can be frustrating. in fact I think you and Recluse are best experts in this field nowadays.

Oddly enough, I had no trouble with the N key pulling up the map. I used the gunship_nocd_editbeta2.exe and Nvidia 177.92 drivers.

I did NOT have the Mod8 installed, though.

Recluse

Thanks, guys. Still no solution for the N/map CTD on my end. I do not have Mod 8 installed yet, so same install as Recluse, except for the later driver. But had same CTD back with the 169.22. Would be my luck that BOTH the older and the latest drivers are the cause.

I am seeing a funny thing. Every so often I lose total control over the chopper. I am flying along and usually when trying to either pedal turn at low speed or slew the nose with the cyclic the chopper just starts jumping around. Feeling is like when you hit the end of a game world, but this is clearly inside the world (e.g. Training mission near targets). Eventually it settles down when I center the inputs.

I don't think it is my Cougar spiking wildly as I haven't seen this in any other sim.

Any ideas?

Recluse

Hmmm. I have exactly the same thing, each time I've flown it: sent off at an angle as if I've struck something. But I thought it was connected with a problem with my joystick, as I've also lost button-ology subsequently - at least once. Looks as if that may have been coincidental but not causaly linked.

@ Eugene: I’ve never had any problems with CTDs unless I’ve mucked about with .exes. Sorry I can’t be of any help with your problem. Just didn’t want ya’ to think that I was ignoring your post.

@ Recluse: Ditto for the above "ignoring" waiver. I can’t capably fly GS helos at the best of times, so I probably wouldn’t even notice if there was something wrong with my controls.

@ Polak: With my card/drivers almost any element that’s mapped to 0 or 255 (X or Y axis) seems to get buggered up, especially if the opposite edge of the texture has transparent pixels. Any element that’s mapped only one pixel in length or width and is surrounded by intentionally transparent pixels also creates problems. The simplest thing to do is to remove as many transparent pixels as possible from a texture. If there’s an element that’s only one pixel long/wide, make it twice as long/wide.

@fng2k: It probably didn’t take as long as you might think. Once I got geared up, each of the textures only took a minute or two to fix. Unfortunately, I should’ve spent three, or even as many as four minutes on each texture, since when I looked closely at ‘em last night, I noticed there was still the odd transparent pixel in a few of the buildings. Relatively unnoticeable on a quick fly-by, but readily apparent upon closer examination. The real time-eater was messing around with a bunch of the buildings’ .3dz files to change element mapping to 1 and 254 instead of 0 and 255. That took a couple of hours.


I think that most of the helo textures are okay, but I’m gonna’ yank the .zip off of my site for the time being. I’ll fix the remaining flaws that I've seen in the buildings, and add the helo thermals within the next few days.

EDIT: If you look closely at the Havoc After pic, you might notice that there's an element which is missing some quite necessary transparency. I went a little nuts, I'll admit, opaquing things. Most things will get straightened out, eventually.

Some NVidia textures for GS have returned. You can get them from here:

NVidia textures

In an uncharacteristically responsible manner, I've tested out this stuff a bit more rigorously.

The first batch of files had a few oddities in it. Somehow, I had even managed to give Apts_6.3db the Apts_6.pcx texture, when, logically(?), it should’ve had Apts_5.pcx as a texture. That, and some other bone-headed mistakes have been fixed. Still, I can't promise that it's all kosher.

Most things in the .zip are NOT meant for ATI cards, but there are four .3dbs that can safely be used by ATI owners:

Silo_1.3db
hokmrtrt.3db
hokmrtrb.3db
UH60_H.3db

Small fixes for tiny problems. It’s likely that most folks wouldn’t see anything amiss with those .3dbs, or, if they did, they probably couldn't care less.

I’m easily annoyed by quite trivial things: little children with tambourines, and dogs with no eyes, for example. Don't get me started about adding pineapple to a pizza. That is worse than wrong, and you would most certainly suffer eternal damnation for such an action.

I fixed the RS for the Blackhawk to avoid scenes like this:


It may seem as though there's still undesired transparencies in the Blackhawk texture (mostly in the tail) but those are due to flaws in the .3db wireframe itself. I can't get at that directly, and it would probably take me several years to fix via hex-editing. It ain't gonna' happen.

It's a pity that WB never implemented any .3db support in 3dzStudio. It'd be a huge bonus to able to view a .3db wireframe with more than 256 elements; even if it was untextured, and even if one couldn't actually edit it.


If you have any problems with this stuff, please let me know.