ROTS graphics issue

[easytarget]

I've recently picked up ROTS, started up a campaign, first thing I notice upon sending out a trade ship, the water effects are all gone, and my ship is sailing around in blue mud, it simply looks horrific.

Whereas in S2 I had all kinds of wonderfully rendered water effects, like wave caps out in the ocean, gradation of color as it moved away from the coast, of course waves crashing where land and water met, now I've got nothing basically, just a big freakin dark blue puddle w/ no animation, color change, etc.

Where i once had a really quite well done water effects, I now have water graphics from 1985.

I've run this under every graphics setting, both DX's, etc. Nothing changes it, when I load a save of S2 I get beautiful water, when I load a save of ROTS, I get nothing but a depressing blob of blue.

Anyone else see this? Anyone know how I fix it?

[easytarget]

Ok, just a bit more in the way of self diagnostics, I loaded a saved game for Shogun 2 again, and this time ran through every water setting available, just to gauge just how bad it was in ROTS, comparable water graphics are showing up as LOW in ROTS no matter what you place the setting at.

So that explains why the water looks like poo in ROTS. Course, it does have the additional issue of still being glitched with lines showing up where minimal amounts of wave action are happening at the coastline, but whatever.

What I'd like to know now is how to kick start water up to the highest level rather than the place it's stuck at now, which is the lousiest low setting.

[A Nerd]

I don't know if this will help, but when Shogun 2 was patch a while back my graphics card no longer had enough MB to run the settings above medium whereas before it could run some at ultra. I upgraded and now I can run the game all at ultra. I went from 250 MB to about 950 MB. I don't know if the game and expansion suffer from this problem, probably not, but I wanted to attempt to give you some insight. :)

[easytarget]

Thanks for the reply, I considered that. But the reason I don't believe that is the issue here is because I've edited the preferences file such that the game thinks I have 2GB of VRAM, which means it no longer checks when loading up (and therefore doesn't downgrade). That and the fact that everything else in ROTS looks just like it did or better (take the land graphics as an example) than it did in Shogun 2.

To me at this point looks like an error in the DLC which is forcing it to load the lowest graphics for water. Unless someone comes along in this thread or the one I started on the same topic at the TW tech\graphics forum and informs me they can run highest level graphics on water and it works, my guess is this is simply broken and needs to be fixed in the next patch.

[Nowake]

It's not a glitch though easy.
They simply wanted to tone down the water effects on the campaign map. There are still glaring differences between Low and Ultra in RotS as well.

As you can see in the screenshot below, there's still quite a lot of detail; they simply preferred to present a becalmed sea, as opposed to the stormy SJ one.

[easytarget]

That would be depressing indeed.

If I wanted what you show above in the screenshot, I could simply set the water setting to LOW and I'd get exactly what's in your picture and in my game (minus the glitch of seeing the lines they programmed in to direct the waves).

Go back to Shogun 2 and turn water to LOW, looks exactly the same as what I see in ROTS under every water setting (as I mentioned, I've gone in and loaded up a game with every water setting available in ROTS, it changes nothing, they all look the same). Why on earth would they intentionally make the water look like this? If I was concerned about performance or wanted this bowl of blue mud off my coast lines I'd set it to low myself. So, improve the island terrain, ruin the water? Really?

This reminds me a bit of their big brother approach to graphics settings where they took a we know best approach and arbitrarily set them where they wanted them relative to your card completely ignoring the settings you set in the game. Misleading everyone into believing they were getting ultra when they weren't, took everyone only a short while to figure out what CA was up to and how to get around it.

I still find it beyond odd you wouldn't just leave this in the hands of your users, what's the point of providing all the graphics options in your menu if you won't trust your users to use them?

P.S. Thanks btw Nowake for the response, appreciate any and all input on this.

[Sp4]

And I thought you were talking about actual in battle water effects o\

Just assume that this is before they started getting rid of all the tuna in the water, so it probably still is a load of blue water/tuna mud ^^