Bad Decals in Half-Life Using TNT2U/5.22 or 5.30

[Killer Ape]

I hadn't played H-L in a while and downloaded some single-player level packs. Upon starting up H-L there was some image flickering at the bottom third of the screen that went away after moving around for a little while. Later I noticed that all the decals (blood, burn marks etc.) were corrupted with black streaks or the background texture leaking through in streaks. The textures behind, and everywhere else, looked fine.

This is weird because I had not updated the drivers (5.22) since last time I played. I updated to 5.30 and patched H-L to 1.1.0 and no change. This is running at 1024x768 using OpenGL on a Guillemot Xentor 32 TNT2U @ 175/183 (spec for this card). It's running on a BX6r2 w/ 128MB PC100SDRAM and a C533A @ 825. AGP is set to 2/3.

Other Q2 based games (Kingpin, Sin) ran fine in OpenGL, as does Q3A. UT also runs fine in D3D. It's really only the decals in H-L that look corrupt. I should note that I did install and/or uninstall several games (mostly those noted above) prior to all this happening. DirectX is v7.0.

Any thoughts appreciated.

 

[dawks]

Grr.. there is a command that fixes that.. Somthing like gl_polyoffset 4.0

I know you can find it on some half-life tweak sites, like http://i.am/halflife

 

[dawks]

And..

<< Other Q2 based games (Kingpin, Sin) ran fine in OpenGL, as does Q3A. UT also runs fine in D3D. It's really only the decals in H-L that look corrupt. >>



Valve programmers were so damn picky they managed to rerwrite somthing like 80% of the code, so its pretty much exclusive from the rest of quake based games.

And I was told from a reliable source, that HL is based on the Quake1 Engine.

 

[nemouk]

Half-Life is based up a heavily modified Quake 1 engine. If you look at the console commands from Quake 1, Quake2 and Half-Life, you will notice that the Half-Life commands most closly resemble the Quake 1 variables.

 

[Aboroth]

If it was based on the Quake 1 engine it must be HEAVILY modified. I don't remember the Quake engine having skeletal structures.

 

[dawks]

Yea, like I said, Half-life is almost 80% VALVe written code.

 

[Killer Ape]

Thanks Daz. I assume its some variable that offsets the decal placement from the background just enough so they don't interfere with one another?

That's interesting about the Q1 vs. Q2 engine. I had always read it was a &quot;heavily modified&quot; Q2 based game. Learn something new every day .

I just got a new GTS card yesterday and haven't seen if that changes things or not.

 

[Killer Ape]

Its got to be the gl_polyoffset variable needing to be higher. When I run in D3D, the decals don't appear AT ALL, indicating they are being rendered inside/behind the surface. I'll have to try D3D with gl_d3dflip enabled and see if they show-up.

This is so weird because it just started happening for no apparent reason.

Thanks again guys.

 

[spikecollarbear]

I had the same decal flicering problems with Half-Life. The problem seems to exist through 5.30, but the 5.32 reference drivers seem to fix this. (As far as 5.22 and 5.30 go, I tried a good number of different settings for gl_polyoffset, from -100, -20, -.01, 0, .01, etc. all with the decals either dissapearing (with 0) or flickering.)

So 5.32 seems to be the fix for this. You can grab it at
http://www.reactorcritical.com. Last time I looked, nVidia's site only had the 5.22 drivers available. BTW, I am using a 3D Blaster TNT2 Ultra.