Daedalus

[Daedalus40]

Hello, Daedalus40 here. Here's a small about me, and my status with the game: Railroad Tycoon 3.

• I'm a 1st year college student majoring in Graphic Design, specifically aiming for video game design.
  
  I play a lot of video games, most of them being in the simulation genre.
  
  I like to mod a lot on my computer, that is when I have the time.
  
  I listen to a lot of music, and I mean music from any year, or any genre.
  
  Railroad Tycoon 3 has actually got me learning the history of the railroad.

I use a Dell XPS435 running on the Vista OS, with an Intel Core i7 CPU processor at 2.67 GHz, 6 GB Ram, and an ATI Radeon HD 4350 graphics unit. Strangely, my Railroad Tycoon 3 game runs fine on my Vista, but I would want to point out some problems I'm observing. Though it doesn't really affect me gamewise.

My game, in a matter of seconds after loading it, it becomes all blurry and pixelated, no matter how high my graphic settings are, it just stays like that, and only in the first few seconds after loading my game, the graphics look great. It makes some of the trains, like the Crampton, look really unpleasant and pixelated. I've tried Anisotropic Filtering, Anti-Aliasing, basically playing around with the buttons, but no change.

With custom train skins, the trains have really bright white highlights around their chassis, but this is only during the night time.

Otherwise, RRT3 has kept me occupied for a good long time, and still will.

[Beancounter]

Hi Daedalus40,

Welcome aboard!

BC

[Sugus]

Daedalus40, aboard!

Everyone joining a forum like this one keeps RT3 alive.

BTW: Anything heard about Ikarus?

[Hawk]

I'm a bit busy at the moment, but I wanted to say aboard Daed.

[Daedalus40]

BTW: Anything heard about Ikarus?

lol

Anyways, thank you for having me here.

[WPandP]

Welcome to the forum!

As to your technical issues, I can't be much help there, since I have zero Vista experience. However, the one thing I do know about is the nighttime halo or glow of custom-skinned assets; this is not a symptom of your other troubles. It has to do with how the game interprets the alpha channel in skins, and how those custom skins were created.

Basically, the alpha channel can be black, white, or grey (some percentage). To the RRT3 game engine, pixels with black alpha are visible, pixels with white alpha are invisible, and pixels with grey alpha are set to glow at night. The amount they glow varies with the shade of grey - darker grey glows dimmer, lighter grey glows brighter. So, when one creates a skin that contains windows, which should glow at night, one must edit the alpha channel for those regions... which most image editors deal with in terms of levels of transparency. That is, if in the image editor one selects a window and makes it 70% transparent, in the game, rather than seeing through it, it will still be opaque, but at night it'll glow.

The glowing edges happen when a skin gets resized, after having first assigned a black-white alpha channel to it. The image editor averages the values among pixels around the perimeter, so that the edge no longer has a sharp black-white condition but rather there is some grey. These grey pixels around the edge are what glow at night. The skins have to be resized because the game makes use of multiple detail levels, swapping them out based on camera proximity. So, close up you'll get to use the full 1024x1024 skin file, but as you zoom out it will swap in the 512x512 skin, then a little further out the 256x256, etc. Each of those reductions may show different amounts of edge glow, which is why you'll see that glow reduce as you zoom in; generally, at the closest in you'll see a skin with no edge glowing, since it has a correctly delineated alpha mask.

This might also hint at what you're seeing in your other issues, though; perhaps something is convincing the game engine to use only the lowest-resolution skins at all times. If that is the case, it points to trouble with the video card, or rather its drivers. The game may for some reason be assuming that your hardware is incapable of rendering its models, and is defaulting to a lowest possible performance mode. But that's as much as I can guess from here; hope you can find a reasonable solution!

[Daedalus40]

Welcome to the forum!

As to your technical issues, I can't be much help there, since I have zero Vista experience. However, the one thing I do know about is the nighttime halo or glow of custom-skinned assets; this is not a symptom of your other troubles. It has to do with how the game interprets the alpha channel in skins, and how those custom skins were created.

Basically, the alpha channel can be black, white, or grey (some percentage). To the RRT3 game engine, pixels with black alpha are visible, pixels with white alpha are invisible, and pixels with grey alpha are set to glow at night. The amount they glow varies with the shade of grey - darker grey glows dimmer, lighter grey glows brighter. So, when one creates a skin that contains windows, which should glow at night, one must edit the alpha channel for those regions... which most image editors deal with in terms of levels of transparency. That is, if in the image editor one selects a window and makes it 70% transparent, in the game, rather than seeing through it, it will still be opaque, but at night it'll glow.

The glowing edges happen when a skin gets resized, after having first assigned a black-white alpha channel to it. The image editor averages the values among pixels around the perimeter, so that the edge no longer has a sharp black-white condition but rather there is some grey. These grey pixels around the edge are what glow at night. The skins have to be resized because the game makes use of multiple detail levels, swapping them out based on camera proximity. So, close up you'll get to use the full 1024x1024 skin file, but as you zoom out it will swap in the 512x512 skin, then a little further out the 256x256, etc. Each of those reductions may show different amounts of edge glow, which is why you'll see that glow reduce as you zoom in; generally, at the closest in you'll see a skin with no edge glowing, since it has a correctly delineated alpha mask.

This might also hint at what you're seeing in your other issues, though; perhaps something is convincing the game engine to use only the lowest-resolution skins at all times. If that is the case, it points to trouble with the video card, or rather its drivers. The game may for some reason be assuming that your hardware is incapable of rendering its models, and is defaulting to a lowest possible performance mode. But that's as much as I can guess from here; hope you can find a reasonable solution!

WPandP

Thanks for the skin/alpha channel advice. I can see what I can do there.

I kind of figured it would have something to do with my video card. This computer isn't exactly meant for gaming, but, Oh Well. It's not really like I'm pulling my hair out because of it. I have the confidence that I'll find a way.

Still, Thanks for the advice .

[WPandP]

The game is 6 years old now; it's not possible to buy a computer that can't handle the graphics workload, practically! So, your computer config isn't problematic, it's just a matter of getting the game to recognize that your video card, which is several generations newer than what the game was designed for, can actually do what cards of 2003 and earlier could do. I bet once you get the driver issue squared away you'll see that you can run max detail settings and high resolution, no problem.

[Grandma Ruth]

Don't understand a single word you and WP&P are saying to each other but it's good to have you with us and I hope we'll see the benefit of your graphics skills!