[Resolved] Broken Game: Land Battles Appear on Water

BeastG33 · July 05, 2012 08:20 PM

Hi guys. I am having a bizarre problem that makes Napoleon literally unplayable. Whenever I launch a land battle, the game generates the battle on what appears to be a water map. I can only see unit sprites; if I zoom in to see the 3D models, they just disappear. I guess the engine can't cope w/ 3D land units in water. Here is a screenshot:

It looks more "watery" in motion because everything appears to be moving somewhat. This happens with both vanilla NTW and Darthmod. I can get the battles and "3D" units to show up on land if I switch to Shader 2, but it still looks really odd like the shader itself is messed up or something.

Specs
Windows 7, 64 bit
Sapphire Radeon HD 6970 2 GB (CC 12.6)
i5-2500k
16 GB RAM

I've updated the graphics drivers and verified the integrity of the Steam cache, but no luck. Battlefield 3, Arkham City, Shogun 2, etc. all work fine with no issues. Anyone have any ideas? If this is a common bug w/ a common fix, I apologize, but I checked the stickies and did a little searching and came up w/ nothing.

EDIT: dxdiag.txt:

Spoiler Alert, click show to read:

irishron · July 05, 2012 08:45 PM

If it's cross fire I'm reading in the dxdiag, have you installed the game profiles from AMD?
If CF, have you disabled it and just try one card at a time?
CA's specs say 32gb of free space for a reason which is a swapfile and 99% of Windows programs, it's C: drive of which you have less than 10gb. Either free up some room or try to swicth the PAge File as Windows calls it to your other drive but no promises the game will use it there.

BeastG33 · July 05, 2012 09:27 PM

Originally Posted by irishron

If it's cross fire I'm reading in the dxdiag, have you installed the game profiles from AMD?
If CF, have you disabled it and just try one card at a time?
CA's specs say 32gb of free space for a reason which is a swapfile and 99% of Windows programs, it's C: drive of which you have less than 10gb. Either free up some room or try to swicth the PAge File as Windows calls it to your other drive but no promises the game will use it there.

Not Crossfire, just a single 6970. Not sure why it would say otherwise in the dxdiag.

The C: is where Windows is located. It's an SSD, only 160 GB and there isn't much room left. NTW is installed to an HDD though, and there is ~75 GB of space left on that.

I will try to free up some space on the main SSD and see if that helps.

Thank you for your help.

irishron · July 05, 2012 09:39 PM

You still may ned the profiles. I think another member ran into the same thing a while back.

BeastG33 · July 05, 2012 09:41 PM

Originally Posted by irishron

You still may ned the profiles. I think another member ran into the same thing a while back.

I'm sorry, but I'm not sure what this means. How would I fix it?

EDIT: Resolved the issue. I really should have done this before posting, but I just started checking and unchecking various graphical settings. Turns out Volumetric effects and SSAO was causing the issue. I disabled them, and the got past this problem. Any idea why that would be the case?

Of course, I right away noticed the stuttering problem mentioned in this thread: http://www.twcenter.net/forums/showthread.php?t=548220 so now it's time to tackle that issue. Boy, I didn't play any Total War inbetween Medieval and Shogun. Kind of glad I didn't because I heard Empire was a buggy mess and although Napoleon is better, Shogun 2 looked, played, and ran great right out of the gate for me. Having to jump through all sorts of hoops just to get Napoleon to be playable is pretty annoying.

Thanks again irish for the help.

irishron · July 05, 2012 10:07 PM

Those two have been known to cause problems. You're welcome.

hellas1 · July 10, 2012 09:53 PM

Originally Posted by BeastG33

Hi guys. I am having a bizarre problem that makes Napoleon literally unplayable. Whenever I launch a land battle, the game generates the battle on what appears to be a water map. I can only see unit sprites; if I zoom in to see the 3D models, they just disappear. I guess the engine can't cope w/ 3D land units in water. Here is a screenshot:

It looks more "watery" in motion because everything appears to be moving somewhat. This happens with both vanilla NTW and Darthmod. I can get the battles and "3D" units to show up on land if I switch to Shader 2, but it still looks really odd like the shader itself is messed up or something.

Hey bro,

I just gotta say enjoy this screw up man. Seriously, It's a small thing in the scope of stuff.

That picture just made me think: "I bet Napoleonic battles really did look like this."
Massive amounts of gunpowder and cannon fire powder clouds.

I think CA should have made NTW more like this for particular battles actually with things clearing up only after some time of fighting.

Take it easy,
hellas1

MortenJessen · July 13, 2012 06:08 AM

Hi Irishron, and OP...
A clarification: The reason OP's dxdiag shows he has crossfire cards is the structure of the HD6970, the "TeraScale 2 Unified Processing Architecture". It is basicly two cards mashed together to one on a single plate, that has become 1 gpu. But dxdiag is still capable of detecting both of them, but the "hinker" here is what it calls these cards (the dxdiag that is..). In OPs case, it only says "AMD Radeon HD 6900 Series" both places, where as had it been "real" crossfire, both would have said "Sapphire Radeon HD 6970 ", eg the specific name of the card...
OP, thats why Irishron mentioned crossfire. And I agree with him, find the correct profile(s) at their homepage...

[Resolved] Broken Game: Land Battles Appear on Water

[Resolved] Broken Game: Land Battles Appear on Water

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Re: Broken Game: Land Battles Appear on Water

Re: Broken Game: Land Battles Appear on Water

Re: Broken Game: Land Battles Appear on Water

Re: [Resolved] Broken Game: Land Battles Appear on Water

Re: [Resolved] Broken Game: Land Battles Appear on Water

Re: [Resolved] Broken Game: Land Battles Appear on Water