If you understand that you are at the limit of your graphics capabilities why beat yourself up trying to do the impossible, those textures look terrible in the link you provided BTW.

You cant render water textures that your chipset isn't designed to render.

Pixel shader 2.0 & 3.0 is used on the higher water settings under open GL

Running in Dx has no water effects except for the "bland" flat effect, you have been told this already in this thread, sorry to sound curt but it seems you are not reading the already great advice provided

Nvidia Shader 2.0 with a 6800 Ultra



Nvidia Shader 3.0 with a 9800 GTX+



Sorry for poor quality but its video (the best way to "see" it) and the monitors my cheap office one.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: KG26_Alpha,

Thats the water animation that i'd expect to see out of those shaders.

I think you are misunderstanding what i'm after.

I'm not trying to get those water effects and animations.

Underneath the animations is a texture, just like what gets used on land. You can change that texture and make the ocean look purple if you wanted to.
Along with those textures, just like the land textures are other textures that get pieced together and used to represent shallow water. These appear near coastlines or where ever they are assigned to show.
The animations then operate as an overlay, giving you waves, reflections or what ever else gets simulated with the water effects.

I'm not able to see the shallow water textures. Which is confusing because it would be like seeing all the land textures except you would see white spots where ever a city is supposed to be. So unless your saying i need a more advanced video card just to see shallow water textures, then i'll quit rephrasing my question.


Bill

My friend Alpha has explained the problem very clearly, and probably more politely than I could manage The bottom line is that the game uses renders that your graphics chipset is unable to reproduce. So, in answer to your question ".....how i could get water textures in the game like what i see other folks using[?]" see your previous sentence, "....i could do with a better system and card..."

You see....you already know the answer.

I'm sorry for beating this into the ground, but i'm just trying to make sure that what i'm asking is actually being answered, because sometimes people see the card and immediately pounce on that as the issue, when at times, it isn't the card its my configuration or driver..etc.
I don't see why i'd have a white patch where a texture is supposed to be. Not the animations or shadows or what ever else requires Shaders 3.0+ processing.

I normally don't have white patches, instead there is a texture even if its a more basic one, in place of a white patch.

thats all.

Bill

quote:

Originally posted by BillSwagger:

quote:

Originally posted by x6BL_Brando:

The GMA 950 shares the same architectural weakness as the GMA 900: no hardware geometry processing. Neither basic (DX7) hardware transform and lighting,[2] nor more advanced vertex shaders (DX8 and later) are handled in the GMA hardware ."

B

Not true, I'm running Dx9.1c, and ran tests to show the card is compatible with the latest version. It was good up to 9.1c, but not Dx10 compliant.

no, your grafics maybe compatible with directx9, but nevertheless the hardware won't be able to make any use of the advanced features. there is a huge difference between directx9-hardware and compatibility.

quote:

Originally posted by BillSwagger:
Another thing, i downloaded the latest redistribution package of Direct X, which includes all the drivers for Dx7 through Dx10, and all of the latest patches (Aug 2009). This alone, added more lighting depth giving more better shadow detail and better reflections off the water.

the distributions won't give you anything new or better... even if you had a directx9-hardware. they (in rare cases) contain debugged libraries, and often just include adrressing for newer hardware (which hasn't been out when the version was originally released).
the most use for the new libraries is only for developers, there is no advantage installing them for average users (you will note, that it even says: 'debugging' library in your diagnostics...)

quote:

Originally posted by BillSwagger:
It did not fix my problem in OpenGl.

no, surely it won't. directx is a programming language, the rendering is done by opengl. the opengl-version will be updated by the grafics-driver, has nothing to do with directx.


furthermore, the concept of shaders is strongly related to textures. a texture can be defined solely with shaders, without any bitmaps. however, this is not the case with this game's landscape, but maybe with the underwater-surface (since not much variety is needed there, and simple shaders v1 can be used even in software-rendering)

Thanks Deepo i think that about sums it up.

and thank you everyone else for your patience in answering my questions.

Bill