"LO Reload" damage

First of all, I would like to express my frustration. I'm in the middle of a huge Lock On project, wich I'm working on for almost a year, and a problem of this magnitude is one thing I really did not expect.

It all started yesterday, after I installed the mod called "LO Reload", by Rocky and Grandsurf. Before downloading the EXE file, I read a topic related to it, where the user said his Windows detected a virus on the LO Reload EXE file. But I kept reading and found no more "virus related" post, so I decided to download the mod and install it.

Mod installed. Next step, before opening Lock On: check what files were modified by the author, as I usually do. The author created two files, named "r1.cdds" and "r2.cdds", to replace "LandTexturesSumTGA.cdds" and "LandTexturesSumBMP.cdds". So, besides the fact it was an EXE file, by this time I thought "Ok, just some minor changes here, just two CDDS files".

I open the game and flew for some minutes to check the mod. In my opinion, the textures are oversharpened for low altitude (although it works very good in medium altitude). The heavy, noisy feeling of oversharpened texture was bothering me a lot since take-off, and some textures appeared with jaggie lines, stair step effect. I decided not to use the mod, exit the game and "unload the Reload", pasting back my back-up (CDDS and graphics.cfg) files and deleting the "r1 and r2".

Next time I opened the game, surprise: the jaggies, stair step effect on textures were still there. It was just the beginning of my nightmare.

It`s like "anti-aliasing is set to OFF for terrain TGA files and BMP runway files". (?? - yes, it's weird, but true). And when anti-aliasing is off, jaggies appear on the edge of the texture - here, I got jaggies in the entire TGA texture, not only on the edges!

My first reaction was to check the graphics.cfg file and temptextures folder. It was ok. Then I tried all possible graphic card settings, low/high quality/performance, anti-alias, vertical sync, blah blah blah. ...Nothing. Jaggies still there.

Some hours later, I decided to restore the system. ... Nothing. Jaggies still there.

Next step: run the "original" Lock On (I keep the original Lock On folder to be used in a emergency like this). Guess what? ...Nothing. Jaggies still there.

After a NINE hours journey in a frustrated attempt to solve the problem, I realized the solution is beyond my knowledge and decided to ask for help.

Below, some screenshots. In a still image you can only see the stair step effect. In the video, you will be able to see the "trembling" textures.

It's awful. I've never seen this before in my PC. And it happens only with Lock On, other games are OK.

My project is very important to my professional life. Unfortunatelly, this mod issue can ruin it all. Please help, if you can.

Thanks for the attention.

RF13

video >> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tEzz9jWg6t0

- - -

I watched your video and read your post and honestly, I never saw a thing in the video you posted on youtube and in those pics above, I would seem to think that what you are seeing is just lockon.

Maybe you never noticed it before and suddenly noticed it now ? as, if the mod you added only added 2 files to the game and then you replaced them with the originals once you uninstalled the mod, then lockon should of returned back to the way it was before you installed the mod.

Set your AA and AF to a decent level, use trilinear filtering and if possible use multisampling AA or supersampling and if you use an nvidia video card also turn on Gamma Correction AA which will make things smoother by blending the nearby colours.

But honestly, I just think its lockon and that you maybe never noticed before? if it isnt lockon just being lockon, then what you have shown in the video and pictures I cant tell the difference between them and my game because thats roughly what it looks like to me without any mods installed.

A couple of the pictures suggest to me that what you are seeing is shimmering and AF should fix that, especially in the distance, if not fix it completely it should make it better, give it a full 16xAF or more if your video card can handle it.

I dont understand why a mod would need an exe extension to add 2 files ? maybe the maker just wanted to make installing the mod as easy as possible for ppl to do ?

If you think that it is messing with your AA, then disable AA in your graphic card control panel, then start lockon and see what its like without AA, take a picture and then come out of game, increase AA to the next step and then go back in game again and take another picture with the same or similar angle and object and then close the game and repeat until you max out AA, then compare all pictures to see if your AA is working ingame.

Saying that, it could very well be that some of your mods have messed up your game, but if you uninstall them and the game and then clean out registry entries and folders of the mods and lockon then you reall should have no problem when it comes to reinstalling the game again.

Oh, just to add, my ingame settings are this.

AA - 8x

Gamma Correction AA - enabled for nvidia cards, not sure what ati equiv would be ?

Multisampling AA -enabled as supersampling gives me weird lines on the ground. Also not sure what the ATI equiv would be ?

AF - 16x to stop shimmering especially at long distances, if it doesnt cure it totally it drastically reduces it.

Vsync - enabled.

Texture Fitlering -High Quality.

Negative LOD - it depends, sometimes I clamp other times I allow.

Force MipMaps - Trilinear.

And I dont use anything lower in the Texture Filtering options because anything lower than Quality and the stupid optimisations are enabled, like Anisotropic Filtering optimisation and Anisotropic sample optimisation and Trilinear Optimisation, all affect shimmering to one degree or another, so its best to have them disabled and have AF turned on and set to atleast x8 or x16 and higher if possible and set Mipmaps to trilinear.

I use NHancer to make a profile and change settings for lockon and blackshark, as with NHancer you can make ammendments to the profile on the fly and they will take hold in the game straight away, all you do is pause game, alt+tab out and change or tweak a setting and then go back ingame and you can see the difference right away, so if you havent used NHancer yet then you should really give it a try especially if you use nvidia card/s as its a magic application.

Lastly, reinstall video card drivers, maybe they got messed up at somepoint and are causing you the problems that you see ingame ?

Thats about it from me.

Negative LOD - it depends, sometimes I clamp other times I allow.

I think this is the setting you are looking for to help your issue. Turn clamp on!

Thanks for your reply, Bumfire. I`m a graphic designer and I`ve been working with Lock On for years. My old nickname was "Madcat", I made some LO videos in the past, take a look: http://www.youtube.com/madcat013 (Forget about the poor frame rate and focus on the textures. No jaggies there. I have this project I`m working for, for almost one year, not released yet because of > details... There are more than 1Gb of TRK files and ~200Gb of AVI files in my HD waiting to be edited, and I wouldn't have started this project if I had a poor texture rendering.

"No.." That's not "just Lock On" for me. It may be for a lot of people, in fact, because it's so common to see screenshots posted here containing images with low AA settings. I see it all the time. But, again, I never had this in my Lock On. In this specific Lock On project, I`ve modified terrain and aircraft textures, in a wide variety. Although my graphic card is "so-so", I've never run Lock On with "low" or bad anti-aliasing. The maximum my graphic card can offer me is 16x/4x and it`s ok for me, because I`ve never had jaggies, until now. When I first saw it, it was during the "mod testing" flight. I thought it was "just the mod being the mod".

But when I re-entered the game, mod's files deleted and my previous ones loaded, and I saw those horrible TGA terrains blinking in front of me, I was like "whaaaat is that???" You talk about trying other graphic card settings. I tried all of them. AA/AF off, 2x/2x, 4x/4x, 16x/4x, bilinear, trilinear, vert sync on/off, everything. Like I said, it was nine hours of frustrated attempts.

"Lastly, reinstall video card drivers, maybe they got messed up at somepoint and are causing you the problems that you see ingame ?"

Same thought here. I will try and reinstall the drivers...

Thanks again for the attention.

My old nickname was "Madcat"

I could bet you was..I remember there was a movie called rf-13 by you

Cherrs:)!

Hmm, I do believe you are suffering from some type of problem, but what I dont know.

Have you tried installing newer video drivers ? and if you did, did you uninstall the old ones first instead of just updating to newer drivers ? and the crucial and most important bit is, did you use driver cleaner or driver sweeper to get rid of any registry entries and left over files that are left over when uninstalling ? because if your graphics card drivers are the problem, if you just update drivers without uninstalling, or even if you uninstall the driver completly but dont use driver sweeper to clear out the left overs, the problem can be carried forward onto the new driver install.

You probably already know how to do all of this, but incase you dont I will explain how to do it

Download Driver Sweeper, Driver Sweeper is free from www.guru3d.com download area.

Install driver sweeper, but dont use it just yet, it is only used when the pc is in safe mode.

Uninstall your video drivers and then reboot your pc into safemode by pushing f8 as soon as your pc startsup and before it boots into windows., boot into safe mode, once in safe mode start driver sweeper and if the video card you have is nvidia, then select Nvidia display drivers, if the video card is ATI then select ati display drivers.

IMPORTANT if you have an nvidia nforce chipset motherboard, dont select anything other than Nvidia display, because if you do you could end up removing your chipset drivers if you use an nforce chipset motherboard, so just select nvidia display driver and then push clean.

Once you have pushed clean, reboot your pc back into normal windows, then reinstall the same or newer video drivers.

Thats the proper way to change display drivers and to make sure that any problems you are suffering from dont follow you to a new driver.

Hopefully that will fix your problem, if it doesnt, then I can only think that the mod you installed and uninstalled had clashed with another mod you have installed and its one of the other mods thats causing the problem, thats the only thing I can think of, maybe the mod you didnt like has overwritten files of your own mods thus the problems you are suffering.

I hope that is not the case because it could take ages to find out what file/s have been overwritten/changed, I hope that its just a video card driver problem and the steps outlined above should cure it if it is a driver problem.

Have you done a total uninstall and then reinstall of lockon ? at anypoint during those 9 hours of trying to fix the problem ?

bumfire,

the only mods I use are cdds files created by me and some files in temptextures folder. there are no mods in my modman, for example.

and I've tried the original Lock On folder, no mods, "clean", and the problem is still there.

"I dont understand why a mod would need an exe extension to add 2 files ? maybe the maker just wanted to make installing the mod as easy as possible for ppl to do ?"

well, I dont understand it also. it was two cdds files and even with the EXE file you still had to add a line in the CFG graphics file to "find" them. IMO it's pointless. if they wanted to make it easy for the user, why not just release the two cdds files and tell people to rename it to "LandTexturesSumBMP.cdds" and "LandTexturesSumTGA.cdds"? Simple, so simple. I'm not acusing no one here, I'm just saying the EXE file was pointless in this case. I've never had a problem of this magnitude with any LO mods and it came from an EXE file.

I really believe the lo reload mod messed up with my graphic card drivers, like you mentioned above. I will try and follow your steps. I'll reply soon.

thanks again, bumfire.

Some more hours in my journey to fix a damage.

I followed Bumfire's steps.

Drivers unninstalled, driver sweeper in safe mode, clean complete, drivers re-installed and updated.

Graphics in my PC are OK - for all games, not for Lock On... Some screenshots below.

high quality, always...

xpand rally xtreme...

gtr...

and this is my lock on today...

It seems Lock On is not receiving my graphic card settings. Because even I modify then, the game does not respond to it. Maybe the damage was made in this link between the game and the graphic card. This is not my area so I really don't understand much about it. All I know is that Lock On is runnning with poor graphics while other games are perfect.

I don't know wich files were damaged (dll, maybe), so my next and last attempt is to uninstall Lock On. Sad. Will do it now.

Thanks.

ps - please check some shots of my Lock On before this issue:

Last year my lock on was runing perfect now i have fps leaks and the same issue madcat has... i think

My graphic card is Gforce 8400 gs 512 ...

Suad

Are you sure that the mod exe file only contained just 2 files ???

Some exe files can be extracted with winrar for example, depending on the way the exe was made and if their is more than one file it may show it.

If you have winrar installed, then right click on the mod exe and select extract here, it doesnt install the mod again, it will just extract the files that make up the exe so you can see what all it contained, now that doesnt work on all exe files, it only works on some, so you may or may not be able to extract the contents with winrar.

Also, both of you, what Ingame settings do you have ? what is lockon game settings ?

I now see the problem, your screenshots of "before and after" show me what you are suffering from.

Also, I see in your nvidia control panel that you have enabled the crap optimisations, disable them as they make picture quality poor so that you get faster FPS, basically you increase FPS due to the fact that the graphics get worse.

DISABLE

Texture Filtering - mip map optimisation (disable that )

and

Texture filtering - Anisotropic sample optimisation ( disable that )

Set

Texture Filtering - from quality to HIGH QUALITY. ( change from its setting of quality to high quality )

Hopefully that will bring some changes, also take some screenshots of the new settings ingame and compare them with the pictures you posted of how lockon used to look for you.

Also, just to add, I cant see your AA settings, but it should be set to OVERRIDE ANY APPLICATION SETTING and then you should set the level of AA that you want below that.

In order to get Lock On FC to use AA you need to force AA on. When I used Nvidia, I had to set global settings on override aa, then I created a profile for Lock On, and forced AA there too. Try it and see!

Lock On FC 1.12 successfully reinstalled in my system. Now it finally responds to the nvidia 3D graphic seetings. BUT...

Two things:

1- frame rate and anti-aliasing issue

Unfortunately, my Lock On is not the same. Before this horrible LO Reload issue in my system, my "default" settings was AF=8x/AA=8x, trilinear, etc... My GeForce 6200 can give me 16x/8x but I always use 8x/8x, it`s the maximum my system can handle with decent frame rate. Above 8x/8x I used to get low FPS. But now I get low FPS even if I run the game on 8x/8x. If I want the game to run smoothly, I must use 4x/4x or 2x/2x, and of course, image quality is poor. What is the reason for this drop of performance in my Lock On? Updated graphic card drivers?

2- the full shadow bug

I know this bug, I used to have it, but partially. The bug occured only if I zoom out the object too far. Now I have the bug all the time. Updated drivers, for sure.

Suggestions?...

Thanks.

bumfire:

_the exe file was not inside a rar. it was a pure exe file. and yes, there's no way to know how many files inside.

rambo:

too many files in temptextures folder?

kaptein_damli:

I've tried that already. thanks

RF13, some exe files can be extracted by winrar, they dont need to be in the .rar format.

If you havent already tried and if you have winrar installed, then right click on the mod.exe file and select extract here.

If it works it will extract the actual contents of the exe file and show you what made up the exe file.

I used to do that with combofix and a few others, combofix comes as just 1 .exe file, but I used to select extract here with winrar and it would extract the contents of the ACTUAL exe file and show me what the exe file is made up of and what all it does/contain.

The main thing is, it doesnt have to be .rar to be extracted, it can be .exe also, but not all .exe files can be extracted, only some.

The drop in performance could be because your graphics card is allowed to use system ram to help ingames, now if you have installed any programs recently that are using ram and you do not close those programs before playing lockon then the system ram that was available before for your graphics card is no longer available thus your performance can suffer.

It could also be your bios settings if you have changed them recently.

As I said above, your graphics card supports using system memory to help with performance, some bioses have an option to assign more or less system memory to the graphics card, have you messed with that bios setting recently???

Also

Upgraded video drivers may be worse than the previous set, so you can always download older drivers and use them, you can get nearly every older set of drivers that you need from www.guru3d.com

But remember to use driver sweeper as that is VERY important.

I doubt that your 6200 can give you 16xAA and 8xAF, seriosuly, I used to run sli 7800gtxs and couldnt get that and I run a 8800gtx now and cant get 16xAA and for it to be smooth.

8xAA and 16XAf is as much as I can do and my card kills your card, your video card is too underpowered for 8xAA, 4xAA maybe but definetly not 16 or 8xAA

You can try different older drivers, but you wont get that much of a stable game with your card with anything higher than and I will take a guess and say 4xAA

It may be too many files..However i dont know how you could run with 6200 8x AA in lock on with good fps

I can't play it even on high on my 8400 :(

(my 6200 gives me 16x/8x but no way for me to play LO with this setting.)

before the issue, I used to play at 8x/8x (away from terrain, water med) and 4x/4x (when using fraps), no jaggies. now I have jaggies in 4x/4x...

this never happened before, I think the reason is the driver update. but I can't find an earlier version (the older one, from my CD, does not solve the problem, already tried that).

it's unbelievable. all the mess a simple (?) mod can do.

"update"...

the never-ending nightmare.

well, after LO Reload issue, driver sweeper, graphic cards update and blah blah, now my system does not play any video format. When I click a video file, CPU usage jumps to 100%, I press CTRL ALT DEL and after ~ five minutes the task manager opens and I`m finally able to close windows media player or media player classic. Already re-installed all codecs, but it is not the problem.

1- Lo Reload damaged my graphic card drivers,

2- and now, driver sweeper or driver update damaged video codecs?

3- or.. virus?

sounds like your hard drive is about to give up...

Anisotropic filtering (AF) is designed to produce better textures effects at different distances. This is the key to graphics problems which get worse with increasing distance.

Anti-aliasing (AA) helps improve the appearance of lines (especially if they've been rendered with a fast approximation such as Bresenham's algorithm). It helps at any depth of field.

Did you use Modman to install the "Loreload" mod? Personally I have tried Loreload, and I know there are different versions of it out. There is one that uses the mod but someone made it works in all seasons. I also remember to have tried one that is more fps friendly on lower system. It was called enchanced loreload or something. Look for them in www.lockonfiles.com.

I never remember any jaggies or shimmering like you when I used the Loreload mod. Here is a video I made with the mod. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IPx7dU8xM50&feature=channel_page

I can´t remember I had any issues with this mod, I remember I just loved it!

Homever I don´t fly Lock On FC that much anymore as I moved onto Falcon 4.0 AF. I do remember I had to edit the graphics.cfg file and enter two lines in the config file. Maybe you entered the two line the wrong place? Also, when uninstalling the mod with Modman (recommend) or uninstalling the game, it´s very important to run a regcleaner to erase all traces of Lock On before reinstalling it again. Use CCcleaner or Advanced System Care. Then reboot, and install Lock On again. If you still have issues with jaggied lines or AA, I can just imagine one more thing. Maybe you updated your graphicdriver the moment you installed the mod, causing the jagged lines.

Mate, I think you are way off here thinking it's LO Reload mod giving you this... plenty of people use it including me and there's no issues. I think you need to run 16xAF to have textures smooth all the way and at least 4xAA for jaggies... and if you reinstalled the game completely then LO Reload has nothing to do with it any more. A mod can't have anything do with a game if you reinstalled the game. What I think is you must have had some other mods or file modifications you forgot about that might have been giving you better performance, or maybe just some settings in LockOn configuration files etc.

and I forgot to say, if your AA and AF setting are not working in game and you installed some new graphics drivers, go back to older driver you had before with which it was working.