Hi folks,

i have a fairly good spec machine but i have a problem with the colour gradients on LFS. It becomes most evident when driving at Fern Bay. The hi res sky texture i have loaded looks perfect when viewed in photoshop, but in the game the boundaries between the various shades of blue in the sky are distinctly lineated. like there are bands of colours rather than a gradual blend from one to the other.

I have the monitor setting at 32 bit
The 'screen' option in the game is set to 32 bit colour also

Is there a further option i need to set on my video card to get the blending to work better?

Judging by the fact that you said 'hi-res' textures, Im going to assume that its not a small image. Are you sure its set to 32bit colour? Perhaps you could post a screenshot?

the sky texture is one of dons hi res ones

yes im sure the display settings and settings in LFS are set to 32 bit, but i can clearly see that changing between 16bit and 32bit colours in the in game 'screen' options, makes no difference to the colour gradients, so it would appear that the game is somehow 'stuck' on 16bit colours.

screen shot attached

Check if Mip Filter and Dithering is turned on in LFS Graphics options. Also chcek that you haven't disabled texture filtering in your graphics drivers. The screenie you have posted looks like textures are drawn in point-sampling mode. Check whether at least trilinear filtering is enabled. You might try also anisotropic filtering to make a bigger difference. Isn't it your graphcis driver that forces D3D apps to run in 16bit mode?

mip filtering and dithering are on, i couldnt find the 'texture filtering' option on my graphics card (nvidia 7600 GT) but there was one for mipmaps which i set to trilinear filtering, it made no difference though. The graphics card is definately set for 32 bit through its own control panel too. AF is set to max.

Isn't your Image Quality in driver settings slider set to Performance or something similar? Are you using recent drivers?

drivers are what came with the hardware, its a new machine built by a friend for me, the sliders were defaulted to 'performance', but i have changed them to 'quality' already

You might ry updaing them, visit www.nvidia.com and get there a recent version, then we'll see.

ok i have loaded up the newest drivers and put all settings to those you already recommended, and... its still exactly the same there is still no difference when i switch from 16bit colour (in game settings) to 32 bit colour.

My Hi-res Fern Bay sky looks exactly like yours, dynofiend. Funny thing is, not only do I have the same quality settings you have (and a current driver), I also have the same gfx chip: nvidia 7600GT (XFX 7600GT XXX to be precise). Maybe that's the problem?

its weird, but i find it very hard to believe that its a problem with the hardware, especially considering it is brand new with new drivers. Im going to try running some other games i have and changing from 16 to 32 bit colour in those to see if they suffer the same colour problems.

Same thing here. I put it down to a low quality sky. Even though Don's skies are excellent Fern Bay is lacking.

Quote from Davo :

Same thing here. I put it down to a low quality sky. Even though Don's skies are excellent Fern Bay is lacking.

That's what I always thought, but shouldn't everybody have the same gradient-look then? Hm, maybe they do but just don't post here ... ? Who knows...

its definately not a problem with the sky texture itself, ive loaded it up in photoshop on the same computer and there are no problems with the gradients, its a perfect blend.

I can see the banding in the original raw file. JAskyday? if it that one when you look around the sun you can see it's there. LFS amplifies it more though.

yup it is JAskyday1

i have solved the problem, sort of, by copying the file sky_semisun7 and renaming it JAskyday1. The sky works very well in the Fern Bay environment and imo looks alot more intresting than just a plain blue sky.

Rather intrestingly, if you remove the JAskyday1 file totally, the game doesnt load a sky and defaults to a light grey colour, which actually also works extremely well as an overcast sky. Try it!

Maybe skytexture is limited by LFS to 16bit color Scawen knows the answer.

I think that's the answer. People have wanted 32bit skies in the past. Also the images for the various menus seem to be 16bit as well.

LFS does only 16bit for skys and thats the issue.I have been already reading that in past from Kidcodea and Don.We might ask Scawen why is like that and if this could be fixed.

So even the files are in 32bit format the banding in pictures is casued by LFS doing only 16bit rendrening to skys.

Would be worht toi FIX it before the final S2 but I guess Scawen is now very busy with the new test patches and features he want to add like balancing cars and other nice multiplayer improvements.And you know his favourite quote that LFS is not screenshot generator.I can agree it shouldnt be happening nowdays and might be sometimes annoying.

This issue is not related to your graphic hardware thought might be more visible on some LCDs which use only 6bit colours(its 3*6bit for RGB) or on LCD with 6bit+RFC. Almost all LCD currently cant display all colours range as CRT monitors.Its "small" drawback with LCD technology.

Quote from dynofiend :

i have solved the problem, sort of, by copying the file sky_semisun7 and renaming it JAskyday1. The sky works very well in the Fern Bay environment and imo looks alot more intresting than just a plain blue sky.

Nice bit of advice Fern bay looks great with that sky, i never liked that old one.
Thanks for the suggestion