More Awesome Than You!

I actually found a previous topic about this, but it was old, and the necromancy picture pushed me to make a new topic. 

There was talk about people losing their shiny specular effects on various sims objects.  This problem has been bad for me for ages, which is to say many of the common objects looked really crummy, but when I upgraded to vista and the really useless (performance wise anyway) vista nvidia driver, all shinyness was back, and really pretty.  When they finally enabled sli in a later driver (including the current one), all the shiny is gone again.  I was wondering if anyone has noticed this.  I have 2 geforce 7800 GT cards, so I am hoping there is either a solution (i.e. it is just me doing something wrong), or maybe nvidia can fix it (yeah, that is probably a joke...). 

Can't say I noticed, but then I have an 8800GTS which apparently uses different drivers than DX<10 cards.

The current betas (101.something) are much better than the official 100.something drivers by the way.

It probably has something to do with your card's ability (or inability) to use shaders. If your card supports the use of shaders, it's possible that they got disabled when you updated your driver, and simply need to be re-enabled, or that the game suddenly thinks your system doesn't meet the necessary requirements to run the game with shaders turned on, and has turned them off in-game. Next time you run your game, try using the cheat: boolProp useShaders true/false (obviously choose only one option at a time) to see if either option makes a difference. Some people report that the game-objects look more 'shiny' with or without shaders, depending on their card's capacity to use them. The fish also rely on shaders, so this could explain your sudden inability to see them.

Edited because I type too fast.

My current drivers were released a couple of days ago, and are 158.18 (I am running 64-bit vista).  The ones that actually display everything properly were the original vista ones, 97.46. 

I have tried messing with the shaders.  With shaders off, the shiny items look shinier, but I lose bumpmapping and pool reflections.  They were on by default.
With the previous drivers I had both shiny items and bumpmapping, so it is all very odd.
Thanks for the info though.

nva brings up a good point. TS2 has some really screwy shaders, which can cause crashes or distortions in PS3.0 Nvidia cards. Supposedly this will be fixed one day.

Jade: thanks for the news, I see Nvid has the same version for 32-bit Vista :)

I don't have an nvidia card, mine is an ATI.
But it suppports version 3.0 Shaders, and for some reason TS2 did not recognize that, leaving me with no bumpmaps.
There is a config option I found to make the card report version 2.0 shaders rather than 3.0, and that restored my bumpmaps. I didn't actually change anything in the game, just my video card parameters.
This is a vista-ready video card, so that might be why it has a higher shader version.

The usual solution to this is to turn useshaders on in the userstartup.cheat file, but for future reference, where's that config item?  In the Catalyst Control Center?

It is a program called "ATI Tray Tools". One of the many links provided by google is: http://www.guru3d.com/article/atitraytools/189/
The program has lots of cutesy extras, like on-screen frame rate that I figured out how to turn off, and many options I either didn't understand, from lack of RTFM, or find of no use, because I do not write video game engines and such.

Ah, ok -- I used them when I used the Omega drivers, but the O-drivers haven't been updated since version 7.1 of the ATI drivers, and I had problems with those, so I had to go back to the official ATI drivers.  I'll grab a copy.