Ridiculous texture banding and smudging after latest patch

[Claeric]

Is this something that's inherently just THERE in the game, or is there a way to fix it? Is it on my end, or the game's end? Textures are smudgy, and gradients are just plain terrible. Even on sim's faces. It was not like this before.

[Skadi]

My game has always looked like that.

[Claeric]

Well, that sucks. It's kinda one of those "can't un-notice it" things. The second I noticed something was up with the sim's forehead of all things I noticed it everywhere.

I guess the fact that it's visible in screenshots should've said that it's a game problem, not a graphics card or monitor problem, but I was still hoping there was a fix. Or maybe some setting or something designed to cut down on gradient banding.

The base game cheap fridge had a huge problem with this, which was solved by changing the Multiplier so that the texture was flat instead of a gradient. I guess the game just is really really bad at managing gradients? Maybe a default replacement skin would solve the sim problem, and I guess eveyrthing else just is too bad so sad.

[Xianah]

I have noticed this drop in texture quality too. I thought maybe it was a combo of nvidia's latest driver and late nights changes to the games options. Hope it's fixable because as you say it can be distracting.

[Ambular]

This is one of those unfortunate questions that makes it sound like I'm assuming you're an idiot (which I'm not,) but you did double check your game settings, right?  Patches and EP's have been known to reset them without permission before.

That aside, re. the skintone issue: you'd think they would have fixed that problem with TS3 and/or newer hardware and drivers.

Dark skintones and clothing (particularly in neutral tones) tended to look pixellated and crappy in TS2.  S4 had noticeable striation, EA included relatively few very dark clothing items, and running them through BodyShop tended to degrade the images and exacerbate the problem: if you wanted to make any dark-colored CAS content look halfway decent, you had to bypass Bodyshop, extract the images manually and use next to no image compression, resulting in godawful file bloat.  (This was part of what led, I believe, to charges of racism against creators who made their S4 skintones lighter than people considered acceptable.  If you didn't know the right SimPE tricks, though, going lighter was really your only option if you wanted your skintones to look nice.)

Now that I'm looking for it, I see it's either still true in TS3 or else they've actually regressed with LN.  Blotchiness and striation becomes more noticeable as you darken the textures.  I'm beginning to think there may be some hard technical limitation that prevents dark colors from rendering well.  Has anyone noticed similar problems in other games?

None of which explains why the books would go all fuzzy, of course.  :p  Unless they deliberately nerfed rendering quality across the board to compensate for the additional computing demands of running another EP.

[wizard_merlin]

Now that I'm looking for it, I see it's either still true in TS3 or else they've actually regressed with LN.  Blotchiness and striation becomes more noticeable as you darken the textures.  I'm beginning to think there may be some hard technical limitation that prevents dark colors from rendering well.  Has anyone noticed similar problems in other games?

More likely due to the DR (Dynamic Range) limitations of the graphic card and/or monitor, in which case there isn't much that can be done about it.  I have seen it in other games, even in DVD's while watching them, both on the computer and on the TV, although the issue is more prevalent and noticeable on the computer than the TV.

It is usually dark areas which cause the issue, although I have seen similar problems in very light areas as well, suggesting it is probably a rendering issue connected to DR capabilities, which at this time is hard to beat.

None of which explains why the books would go all fuzzy, of course.  :p  Unless they deliberately nerfed rendering quality across the board to compensate for the additional computing demands of running another EP.

I would hazard a guess that the books were never rendered to a high level of quality as they probably didn't envisage people zooming in so close to look at them.  What you see in those shots is what is termed pixel peeping in photography, zooming in way beyond reasonable limits looking for problems which in reality are not actual problems.

[Claeric]

The empty bookshelf hole actually looks significantly worse the FARTHER you are from it.

And no, it's not game settings. And yeah, LN has to have made it worse- I had dark skinned sims before and never had this weird rainbow problem, and I did have weird splotchiness on the walls (particularly the drywall), but again, nowhere near this bad.

[kiki]

Have you checked actual game settings in config files, not in the settings? Is it possible that you're on LODs / low rendering settings despite what you've set manually?

[Claeric]

Texture quality is at "3" in the options config, but then I don't remember a textures option in the menu.

[kiki]

Texture quality is at "3" in the options config, but then I don't remember a textures option in the menu.

I don't like you enough to Google for you, but I know the game taking low quality textures instead of high quality textures was an issue in TS2. I think MTS has the fix for it that you need to enter into your configs.

[Claeric]

http://www.modthesims.info/article.php?t=97876

This?

It's a fix of some kind but it doesn't mention the game using the wrong textures or anything like that. I think most of my settings already match this anyway but I'll try it later.