Problem with ships damaging

[moed]

I recently revived an old system of mine and gave it to a relative interested in playing BC.

I notice that it does an outstanding job in displaying BC at 1280x1024 with everything set on high and 4x AA/8x AF. The problem comes when some (not all) ships start getting/showing damage. 2 examples that stand out are the CG Sovereign and CE Nebula's. The Sov on my system (Nvidia GTX295) shows damage correctly but on this other system it starts displaying parts of itself transparent when taking damage and you see phasers firing from empty space where sections of the ship used to be. The CE Nebula's on the other hand damage fine... but during the cut scene where the ship is exploding, an exact duplicate of itself is created exploding along with its "other" self??

Many other ships however, damage perfectly fine. Could this be a possible video driver problem? Has anyone else ever experienced these same or similar things happening? If so, was/is there a solution? The system in question has a Sapphire ATI Radeon X850XT Platinum Edition Vcard. Older... but very fast card.

Thanks

[Nebula]

delete the vox_nif file in the ships model folder.

[moed]

Thanks Neb, that did the trick.

One more thing... it's minor but when a ship starts taking barely any damage (not enough to cause any actual real damage yet... IE. at the beginning of a battle)  and it is viewed from a distance, I can see some damage textures but when I zoom in to view the ship in question, it looks completely intact.

Any thoughts on this?

[CyAn1d3]

my system does that as well, its something negligible to me tho

[Nebula]

Might be a mipmap issue... turn it off. 

[CyAn1d3]

Might be a mipmap issue... turn it off. 

the hell is a MipMap to begin with?

[Kirk]

Mipmaps are smaller maps generated by BC's engine to save on gfx memory.

[CyAn1d3]

Mipmaps are smaller maps generated by BC's engine to save on gfx memory.

you had me sold on SAVE and MEMORY..

[moed]

Might be a mipmap issue... turn it off. 

Been busy for a couple of weeks but I finally had a chance to try this out.

I turned off the mipmaps and the issue still exists?? It's really not that big of a deal but still... it would be nice to fix this.

I'm now trying different settings within the video card driver though so far, no luck.

Any other ideas?

[MLeo]

Mipmaps don't truly save memory. In fact, the GFX card makes a couple of continuously smaller textures out of the big texture, to use on further distances where you couldn't possibly see the details of the big texture anyway. In that respect, it saves memory.

[moed]

Still wondering if there were any other possible thoughts out there as to the resolution of:

"One more thing... it's minor but when a ship starts taking barely any damage (not enough to cause any actual real damage yet... IE. at the beginning of a battle)  and it is viewed from a distance, I can see some damage textures but when I zoom in to view the ship in question, it looks completely intact.

Any thoughts on this?"

It isn't a mipmap issue as I've turned off, set to lower detail, and pretty much every other combination imaginable etc., etc., and the problem still persists.

[moed]

I realized that my relative who's been having this problem has a 19" LCD monitor and that his connection was with a standard VGA cable. My LCD is hooked up with a DVI connector and the graphics are really smooth on it. So, I decided to try a DVI connection with his monitor and it worked!

Apparently, the digital signal is obviously much cleaner than the digital/analog conversion done with a standard VGA connection so now the sync rate is - for lack of a better description "steady" and the textures are perfect at any distance from the camera.