Please help with moire problem with BLW "B" Units

steve · Joined: 27 Apr 2009 Posts: 6

Hi,

I have several of the great BLW F-7 sets. Problem with all of them is that when I zoom out, the "A" units look great, but the "B" units get an ugly black moire look to them. (See photo) I have an excellent video card with 512 mb of ram, current drivers, so forth, and a 3 ghz P4 CPU.

Can I correct this with some sort of graphics tweak in the sim, or the card, or?

This only happens with the B units- not the Geeps, the "A"s, or any other of Gaetan's great trains.

Thanks for any help you can give.

Steve

Gaetan · Posted: Mon Apr 27, 2009 9:22 pm Post subject:

wow ! very strange, look like an video card problem

you see the inside background poly thru the side poly

have you try antialiasing setup for your card ?

uli · Joined: 21 Sep 2007 Posts: 116 Location: Berlin, Germany

Hi Steve,

two more questions:

- What video card do you have?

- At which resolution are you running MSTS (16 bit or 32 bit colour depth)? If you are running MSTS at 16 bit, try 32 bit.

uli

steve · Joined: 27 Apr 2009 Posts: 6

Hi Gaetan & Uli,

Thanks for trying to help.

I have an ATI Radeon 3600, and I run at 32 bit resolution. I had this problem with my previous card, also an ATI. I wonder if it's an ATI-related problem? I'm still puzzled why it only happens with the f-7 "B" units and nothing else.

Steve

GaryG · Guest

Hi

I have seen that problem before but I can not remember the fix. I also use an ATI card; I do think it was a BLW loco set though when I saw it.

Does it display properly with ShapeViewer?

GaryG

steve · Joined: 27 Apr 2009 Posts: 6

Gary,

Interesting.

In ShapeViewer, the "B" unit displays fine at first- I can zoom out to 40.5 meters ok. But, at 41 meters, the unit goes black. I try the same thing with the matching F-7A, and I can zoom out all the way and that unit still looks fine.

I'm stumped with this one, and appreciate any ideas you might have.

Steve

steve · Joined: 27 Apr 2009 Posts: 6

Fellows, my apologies to all. I THOUGHT I was displaying at 32 bit- I just checked again and realized that when I'd upped my resolution to 1280 I'd changed back to 16-bit. I feel dumb. dumb dumb.

Thanks to all for your help on this. I love Gaetan's trains, and was disappointed by this- until now. I believe I will now console myself by splurging on the BLW SP pasenger back I've been wanting.

Thanks again to all!

Steve

GaryG · Guest

Hi Steve

I don't think you need to apologize at all. ShapeViewer shows the "B" sides black at some distances while the "A" renders fine at all distances. I am using a 32bit desktop to look at these files.

There does appear to be a size difference between the "B" unit's ace files and the "A" files. TGATool2 shows both .ace files being 1024x1024x24 bit+Trans (Comressed). The Alpha channels aren't identical so I might expect some size difference yet the "B" files are both almost 1MB smaller.

Perhaps less ace file detail (1MB smaller) may account for the rendering differences. looking at the s files with Archibald doesn't show any rendering differences so I do suspect the ace files.

I just looked at Gaetan's BLW_F7_DRGW "B" unit with ShapeViewer. It does not have the same problem. I compared the ace files size differences. The DRGW files "B" files are about 100k smaller than the "A" files while the ATSF "B" files are about 1M smaller so I think we can assume the older ATSF "B" files do have less actual detail embedded in the ace files.

GaryG