Wirehead Studios

I just got hold of a GeForce FX 5500 so I could play D3 at something resembling a decent framerate. After a few rounds I decided to load up Gen. Still, all was fine until I loaded up Deadmeat and I saw a phenomenon I'd never seen before - black borders around the skybox as if I was fighting inside a giant transparent cube!

I thought this only happened with ATI cards! Does anyone know if there's a way to get rid of them?

Try setting r_finish to "1" and see if that helps any.

I hate those borders.

No joy. I even tried experimenting with Sock's skybox re-editing technique to no avail. I suppose I'll just have to wait until Carmack gets his arse in gear and releases the source code so someone can fix the bug. God knows when that will be. :(

I've never seen this happen myself, so I don't know what to look for.  If you email me a copy of your q3config.cfg file from your Generations folder, along with a screenshot of the problem, I could take a look and see if I can locate a variable that might be causing the problem.  At least we could rule out a .cfg issue and trace it down to either drivers or hardware.  If this sounds like a good option just send me a private message and I'll reply with an address you can send files to.

I get the same thing on Howling Wilderness. I'll get a screenshot and send you my q3config when I next have a chance.

Wait a sec, what? You're saying that it isn't only ATi card users that see the nasty black skybox edge?? How odd.

As an ATI man (9800 pro) I see this.  I kind of think of it as the world we are fighting in, watched by those who set up the arena. It akes he place seem kind of eerie.

Mind, I would like to get rid of it too.

I always thought they were related to roundimagesdown or lower picmips..

Pho: That might not be a bad idea, although I haven't actually tried out VQ3 yet (I just load up Gen and pick Arena class these days :thumb: ) but I'll give it a try later. If there's still no luck I'll fire the .cfgs your way.

Tek: I was scanning the net trying to find out more about this problem when I found it. Apparently it affects more recent nVidia chipsets. My old GF2 never had this issue, but you could make tea between screen updates on Doom3.

Tab: What's that? Is it a cvar of some kind? Might be worth looking into.

I've never seen this happen myself, but I am using an older GeForce 4 card.

Never mind, I just doublechecked that, and that's not it. I don't have skybox lines, and I'm using a 6800gt. r_roundimagesdown doesn't make a difference. I'll do some more cvar testing.

Hmm, an update.
It seems I have those irky lines too, but only in Jugulatordm2v2 (Howling Wilderness). None of the original Q3 maps have it, and none of the few other maps that I know to have pretty skies (such as Overwhelming Hostility). None of the graphical settings I change in-game have any effect on the skybox. Doesn't matter what settings I use outside of Q3 either. Odd, never really noticed it before.

Heres a shot on my other comp with a Voodoo 5500, with amigamerlin drivers. If I knew what to do I could check any diffreances to any files between these two cards. if it was any use to you.



an update: I only seem to have it on this one map in Gen. and none in plain Q3. I ave seen this before, but can't remember where. I wanted to get really close to have a good look at it but can't.

ho hum.

Yea, sky boxs are a total buzz kill. :P

Suddenly I feel like a complete prat. Due to other technical issues I had to reformat my PC today. I reinstalled all my games and guess what? Yup, they're gone. It would seem that a fresh install of WinXP along with the drivers has rectified it. It must have been a conflict with the old drivers being overwritten, or something. :rolleyes:

Thanks anyway, people!

I get these on several maps, including Howling Wilderness and DeadMeat, but ONLY after I upgraded to my 9800 pro

I'm using a 9600XT, and I see it. I haven't noticed it on Deadmeat, but it's fairly obvious on Wilderness.

Found this: http://www.own-age.com/forum/thread.aspx?id=18438 (http://www.own-age.com/forum/thread.aspx?id=18438)

This concerns nVidia cards.  Still looking for something in regards to ATI cards, but if there's a conformant texture clamp option in the ATI drivers you might try disabling that.[/color]

Well, I have not updated my drivers for the 9800 Pro since Oct 2003. I have the skybox on HW2, but nothing else in Gen or Q3.


I have just remembered I have the Nvidia chip on my Motherboard.

Heh, I did try disabling the texture clamp, but it didn't work for me. Perhaps I borked it up or something :]

NAILED!!!! I've sussed out what was causing the problem, although it still baffles me as to why it was happeneing. Basically, due to my average connection I originally downloaded Gen as zip files, but this time I used the installer. To cut a long story short, I was using shortcuts to .bat files for all the mods I have installed, but the shortcut provided by the Gen installer got rid of the problem. When I used my old .bat file they came back. VQ3 didn't have the lines when I just hit quake3.exe. Thanks to Gen's own shortcut, I've also learned how to add command line functions to all of the other ones without the need for .bat files.

Back in business!!

How can this be? :huh:

Your guess is as good as mine.

Er, well, glad the problem is fixed for you in any case!  Everything I've been seeing about the ATI cards is pointing to a driver bug, so I'm afraid those using ATI will have to make do until someone fixes it.

I don't often look at the sky, anyway, so if it's a driver bug that only screws up skyboxes in this manner, it's not a problem. :thumb:

Another driver bug prevents rendering of the specular lighting in the FS2_Open engine builds for FreeSpace 2, so it looks just like normal FS2 lighting. This one can be fixed by downgrading your drivers to an older version, but you lose a lot of performance in other games by doing that. I don't see why the Catalyst drivers aren't as good as custom drivers. Can't they implement the fixes that are currently only available in custom drivers?

 :offtopic:
Has anyone noticed that this place is less active than it used to be?
*watches tumbleweed roll by*