RTW Alexander: missing graphics

**Draigh** · September 04, 2010, 06:11 AM

Hello all,

A while ago I decided to reinstall RTW and its expansions again for nostalgia purposes. As I'd never really given much attention to the Alexander campaign I decided to give it a shot. Unfortunately some graphical issues are preventing me from enjoying the game very much.

Meet the headless horsemen:

That's right, Alexander is leading a ghost army, can't be too hard to conquer the world with that. And it's not just his bodyguard either, check out these Hypaspists:

At first I guessed I had made a corrupt install so I uninstalled and reinstalled, to no avail. Playing around with the graphical options I found out that turning off the unit shaders removed most of the problem, although the units now look horrible and the problem still isn't completely fixed, simple soldiers are rendered correctly but special units, like flagbearers and generals are still invisible.

Now I have to admit that I have a pretty sucky integrated video card, an ATI Radeon Xpress 1150, but what is quite startling is that I have no problem running vanilla RTW and BI without any problem. I do remember that the first time I installed Rome Total Realism I had a similar problem, but if I recall correctly that was due to installing it over the wrong version of RTW. This time I did the following:

- Install RTW
- Patch to 1.3
- Install BI
- Patch to 1.6
- Install Alexander

Which I believe to be the correct order.

Would anyone have another idea on how to fix this?

**Hopit** · September 04, 2010, 06:28 AM

I believe it is graphics card

**irishron** · September 04, 2010, 06:44 AM

Do you have shaders turned on?

**Hopit** · September 04, 2010, 09:20 AM

no,no no, its not shaders, I had that problem and fixed it with updating my graphics card

**irishron** · September 04, 2010, 09:59 AM

If your graphics card/chip does not have at least 128mb dedicated memory and support shaders, this will happen along with updated drivers making all the difference in the world.

**Hopit** · September 04, 2010, 12:22 PM

I have under 100mb dedicated memory

and no problemos

**irishron** · September 04, 2010, 12:58 PM

On battle map?

**Draigh** · September 04, 2010, 04:05 PM

My video card has 128MB of memory and supports pixel shader 2.0. It's also updated to the latest drivers, so that's not the problem.

irishron: while the shaders are turned on it's the worst, turning it off solves most of the problem though not all (see the pictures in the OP).

**Hopit** · September 05, 2010, 03:11 AM

Originally Posted by irishron

On battle map?

well, normal unit size and medium unit models no problemos

**irishron** · September 05, 2010, 06:36 AM

Originally Posted by Hopit

well, normal unit size and medium unit models no problemos

I've seen some crazy things so I'm not surprised but yours is not the "norm".

**irishron** · September 04, 2010, 04:59 PM

Have you updated directx and .Net framework manually?

**Draigh** · September 05, 2010, 04:50 AM

Originally Posted by irishron

Have you updated directx and .Net framework manually?

No, I might try that. However, I doubt updating further would do the trick since I could play the game perfectly one or two years back with whatever versions I was playing at the time.

**irishron** · September 05, 2010, 06:39 AM

Originally Posted by Draigh

No, I might try that. However, I doubt updating further would do the trick since I could play the game perfectly one or two years back with whatever versions I was playing at the time.

I have found it best to keep Windows services up to date whether the updater knows what ti's doing or not or if it even helped the game. To me, it's part of computer maintenance but it's your choice. It may help the game, it may not.