Hawk & Badger Railroad Forum

Hello every one, I am new here, and this is my first topic.
Is there anyone who can tell me why this game is so ugly in win 7 and so beautiful in win XP?
Is there any workaround?

The game was designed for Win XP and has never been updated for the newer versions of Windows. There have been lots of issues with getting it to work with Vista. What kind of issues are you seeing?
I have not touched Win7 yet, but there are supposed to be some tools for compatibility settings for the .exe file. Might be a way to work around it. Maybe some others are giving this a try.

Already tried to go with XP mode under W7?

Hi.
As I told you, it's a grafic proplem. The game it self runs very nize, but the grafic .
It's when zooming close the leavs on the trees for exampel is just some big square. Everything is ugly.
I have two GeForse 9600 GT in SLI mode. 8 gb rab intel 3.16 ghz so I belive I have what it needs and more.
XP-mode does not help.

I hope someone can sovel this problem.

Have you played around with the game settings, those within the game? Anti-alias, anisotropic, detail levels, etc?

It's a similar problem with Vista...and something I am always trying to figure out...

I belive that I have tryed everything befor I askt you incl. search the internet. I thought that if enyone can sovel this problem it haas to be you gays.

Is it only looking bad on extreme zoom? The game has limits on the detail of the graphics due to the method used when it was made. IF you notice the trees are made of about 3 flat planes that intersect and give a reasonable feeling of color and shape when viewed from a distance. But up close they look like paper pop-ups.
How does it look at a 'reasonable' zoom? Like where you can get a 4-car train into the screen.
From the original post, you say the XP and the Win7 come out different. You might also want to look at the comments on getting RRT3 to run on Vista.

The more high detailed pic for the first 1 second of launching a level.


What you see after the first 1 second when all detail settings seam to be forced to Ultra Low.

Here is a sample comparison image of the Graphics Issue. Everything is set to max and as you start a level, for a brief 1 second period you can see the max detail (Or so, Seen in the first pic) but after that second, everything gets sort of forced into ultra low detail mode. (as seen in the 2nd pic. Pay special attention to the trees, the ground texture detail, and the waves from the water) It seems like a graphics/speed issue similar to Need For Speed Porsche Unleashed. On any computer over 1Ghz Porsche Unleashed would force Ingame car detail to low but just underneith the 1Ghz barrier and full detail was allowed. (Proven on a Centrino Duo laptop at 865MHZ (power saver mode) and at 1.73ghz (full power mode). On that same laptop at either speed RT3 works with full detail so possibly it could be either a 2Ghz barrier, or something to do with driver handeling (DX10 perhaps?). So far every game I throw at Vist/7 works like a charm with minimal tweeking (Minus 16bit installer issues and such with 64bit windows). RT3 has given me no issues to make it run itself, but I cannot play it in its super low detail form lol. I would rather it be a text game lol. (RT2 works like a champ and looks great considering its graphics engine.)


The system I am running the game on is using Windows 7 Ultimate 64bit (Previously Windows Vista Ultimate 64bit). Core 2 Quad Q9550 @ 3.84Ghz. 8GB DDR2. ATI 4870X2 with 9.11 Drivers. (=500-900FPS. V-Sync does nothing to alter the graphics issue with it limited to 60FPS) The laptop that was mentioned is on a Centrino Duo 1.73ghz (865Mhz in Low Power mode) (Pre Core 2 Duo days so no 64bit. Just 2 old Centrino Mobile cores in 1 chip), 4GB DDR2 (3gb useable in 32bit Windows 7), and 3D is supplied by a Intigrated Intel 945GM. Nothing fancy but it runs the game in full detail. (20-40FPS)


*UPDATE*
On the same main system I have an Nvidia 9800GT (Used mainly as a physx processor but hey it can do other things like Folding and uh 3D. ;) On this RT3 crashed and the Vista fix that disables Hardware T&L worked to get into the game. With everything else remaining the same the graphics outcome is the same so this issues is not an ATI/Nvidia based issue.

Sounds very familiar. I have both Win XP SP3 and Win 7-64 with RRT3 1.06 installed, and the game behaves differently in these operating systems. Although it looks rather ugly in closest zoom modes under Win 7, I haven't found that too annoying, since otherwise it looks and works very nice for most of the time. Btw, It is not a clock speed issue, since my 3.8 GHz quad-core AMD rig runs the game perfectly on XP. Graphics card is ATI Radeon 4890.

Seems to be a serious problem for those using w7.
Here, too, since I installed w7 never got good graphics.
I tried virtualbox 3.1.2 but RRT3 not enter it installs but does not run, I could not identify the problem then gave up.

quad core 9950 - 4GB ram - w7 32 bits - geforce 9400GB 1GB

At the moment without playing that way because there is no way.

Hmm. After tinkering with RT3 again today... I am at a loss of what is exactly causing the issue. Could it be having a C2Quad vs a C2D? Graphics card identification? What?

I came to this after testing RT3 on a recient system I built with a C2D E6600, ATI 4670, 2G Ram, and Windows 7 64bit.. The game runs and looks fantastic on it. At any speed too. From 1.8Ghz to 3.0Ghz...

SO was thinking maybe its still CPU based like Porshe Unleashed, nope. I underclocked my current Q9550 from 3.84Ghz down to 1.7Ghz (200mhz FSB lol) and the game continued to look like poo... So I know now that it is not CPU speed based, I will continue testing but untill someone that knows a bit more about debuging then I takes a wack at it, I still do not know how to fix such a stupid issue.

I don't have win7 so I don't know any solution off hand, I wonder what people have in common on their systems that don't run it properly. I once had a game that wouldn't run properly when I tried to install in on a dual-core and I had to turn off hyperthreading.

It seems fairly simplistic for it to actually work but I wonder if this option works for RT3 like it did for this guy with Diablo: http://social.technet.microsoft.com/For ... 40af92d21f

I wonder if any of the Germans over at Molse's forum have figured out anything on Win7

Maybe compare driver versions for the card on those two computers. You might have to revert back to an earlier driver.
Just a thought.

I've thought about it.
I have two video cards.
An onboard Geforce 8200GT and Geforce 9400GT another offboard.
Would turn the 9400GT only RRT3?

There is no solution for this yet?

I have an idea as to why the graphics are bad, and I don't think it's Windows 7.
This is a picture from my desktop computer which is running Windows 7.



This is a picture from my laptop which is also running Windows 7.


As you can see, the difference in quality in astounding. The two machines are also quite different.

Desktop:
Intel Q6600 @ 3 GHz
ATi 4870 512MB
4GB RAM

Laptop:
Intel U9300 @ 1.2 GHz
Intel GM45 64MB
4 GB of RAM

I think it might have something to do with the power of the computers. I'm going to try under powering my computer later and see if that fixes the graphics problem. What do you all think?

The way the skins work, there are 5 or 6 versions at different resolutions, and they are supposed to get swapped out depending on how close the camera is (the zoom level). The first image shows that the building is, in fact, being rendered with one of the skins for the building, but it's one of the lower-resolution versions. It doesn't appear to be the lowest resolution skin, though; perhaps skin "D" of "A" (highest) through "F" (lowest resolution).

I would suspect a problem with the driver for the video card; try updating the driver. A possible workaround, though it would be cumbersome, would be to remove all the low-res skins and only have an "A" skin to work with; to accomplish this, one would have to unpack a lot of game files and then delete (or preferably rename) assets. This would take some doing, no doubt! However, it could serve as a testing procedure: install one of the modded buildings, and strip it of skin files other than the "A" skin. That would force it to render using only the highest-res skin, at all zoom levels. The game can function fine that way, it will just tax the system a bit more, but then your hardware is more than capable of handling the workload.

Another useful test might be to just run the game at a few different resolutions, and see if you always get the same skin effects.

EDIT: It appears you have some custom content which is rendering correctly. Maybe just placing all the graphic assets into the PopTopExtraContent folder would do the trick - it might just be assets located in the originally installed PK4 files that aren't working as expected.

Ttimber13 wrote: As you can see, the difference in quality in astounding. The two machines are also quite different.

Desktop:
Intel Q6600 @ 3 GHz
ATi 4870 512MB
4GB RAM

Laptop:
Intel U9300 @ 1.2 GHz
Intel GM45 64MB
4 GB of RAM

I think it might have something to do with the power of the computers. I'm going to try under powering my computer later and see if that fixes the graphics problem. What do you all think?

Most people that have posted the power of their computers and saying Win7 gave bad graphics seem to all have a quad core processor and a more powerful video card compared to win7 machines that give decent graphics which have a less powerful video card and only dual core processors. I'm not sure if it would really make any difference but you could always try starting up RT3 and getting to the initial menu before loading a scenario, then alt-tabbing out, then ctrl-alt-del to get to the task manager, next under the processes click on RT3 and right click and hit set affinity, then try allowing it to use only 1 core (or maybe 2 cores since it works on dual core computers fine). It probably won't work but at least it's something else to try other than the update your video drivers idea if that hasn't worked for anyone. If it does work it's only a temporary fix though as you'd have to do it each time you start up RT3.

Look what happened to me.
I was using win xp with the same quad core and everything was normal, with the exception of video card, which was a geforce 8200 onboard.
When I installed an offboard GeForce 9400 GT, installed along with it win7, then it got that way, with bad graphics.
Therefore I believe the problem is or within the win7 or inside the video card.
In the future I want to reinstall win xp on my machine just to take this course, but the time does not to do that.
If someone can do this to say to us would be good.