Hi there,
here it is my first thread on the board.
I played Massive Assault quite a bit last year without problems, and I have recently purchased Domination.
I have checked for this issue in the forums without luck, so I suppose it wasn't discussed yet (except from a small comment from Tryptamon in
this topic regarding blue shadows).
The following bug affects both Massive Assault and Domination, and I am experiencing it on two different machines:
PC#01:
Software: WinXP, SP2, .NET Framework 2, ATI Catalyst 6.8 (tried also with 6.4 and 6.3), DirectX 9.0c.
Hardware: ASUS K7N8X, Athlon XP 2700mhz, Radeon 9600 Pro AGP (128mb ram), Nvidia nForce Audio (integrated chipset).
PC#02:
Software: WinXP, ATI Catalyst 6.8, DirectX 9.0c.
Hardware: ASUS K8VX, Athlon 64 3200+, ATI X1300 AGP (256mb ram), SoundMax Audio (integrated chipset)
While the overall graphics looks good, there is an annoying bug involving the shadows of the units (trees and static units such as bases are ok): the shadow of each movable unit is of the same color used to represent its player, such as Red or Blue, instead of being black. The overall result is very similar to "see-through" effect which lets us see our units even when they are covered by a structure or a tree, only applied to unit's shadow.
After experiencing the bug I launched Massive Assault 1 and noticed that the bug was there as well, and slightly worse (the cities are 'colored' as well, and there is no way to turn this off). It has been some months since the last time I played Massive Assault on PC#01 with no graphic glitches, and I have reinstalled WinXP since then even though I didn't change its hardware configuration. I then noticed that the same problem applies to PC#02 as well.
An interesting aspect is that the shadows of trees and static meshes are looking good, and it is probably so because the projected shadows algorithm Domination used for the tree shadows (which Massive Assault didn't have) is different from the one used for the units, which was probably ported almost directly from the first Massive Assault (if a developer is reading, he could confirm or deny it
).
At first I thought it was related to the new ATI Catalyst Video Drivers, so I reverted to the 6.4 (and 6.3, just in case) without success; I don't think I was using even older drivers back then, though the issue could still be related to ATI cards.
As you can see from the configurations posted above, apart from the video card of the same company (although different models), the two configurations are not exactly alike. Does anyone know of a solution for this problem?
Of course, every other game or app works graphically fine (from latest to older ones).
Thanks in advance.