dds textures not loading right.

[Legacy_Drethnor]

               After installing SoU & HotUD I noticed that dds texture alpha transparency 
is messed up. wondering what's causing this. Will exporting the dds textures
to .tga in the override fix it? These are the original game textures btw. 
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_wyldhunt1]

               Sounds like a graphics card driver issue.
tga is compatible with more graphics card drivers than dds, so that may be a solution.
Make sure that you try updating to the newest version of your graphics driver first.
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Drethnor]

               I have the newest drivers....
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Bannor Bloodfist]

               couple things to consider;

1) Bioware DDS is not industry standard DDS.

2) Newest drivers / Latest drivers don't always fix this issue, sometimes you have to go the other way.  NVidia stopped supporting the older Bioware version of DDS a few driver revisions back, and then added them back in at some point for some cards, at least that is the assumption you have to make since some folks have no issues.  You MIGHT have to go backwards with your vid driver to get dds to work correctly.  I know that I can NOT use the latest drivers with my current NVidia card as the latest driver appears to have dropped support for the Bioware version of DDS.

3) I can't recall if you can disable DDS support for NWN, but I do know that TGA if placed into override should work.  Gonna mean a huge override folder though.

There used to be threads regarding this issue, but you will have to search backwards quite a ways now I bet.  Since they were never stickied the solutions are going to be a bit more difficult to find.
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Drethnor]

               Thanks for the reply,
I have tested on 3 different pc/vid cards and have had the same result on each.
This is why I knew it wasn't just me. I guess I just happen to have the cards/drivers
That don't support bioware dds. So your saying if I export every dds file into the override folder,
That it "should" fix it? I'm planning on using nwn explorer to do this unless there's an easyier way?
Also I'm using a dedicated pc for nwn and older games it's a pentium 4 winxp system with a GeForce4 4800 ti in it. Do you happen to know of a driver that supports bioware dds for this card? Kinda funny how nwn was made to run best on gforce4 cards. But Nvidia screwed that over.
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Bannor Bloodfist]

               Well, if you have the same problem on 3 different vid cards, something else may be setup incorrectly.  As to what, I really couldn't say.

If you dig backwards in this forum, or even search it for dds, you might find the solutions there.

Doing the export to tga is a royal pain, and takes a huge amount of disk space and really clutters up the override folder.


One thing you might have success with, is updating XP, when you update, check the optiosn of optional updates, see if there is a different vid driver for your card listed there.  Not sure if that will work, but it might work better than what NVidia supplies.  To be honest, I can't really remember exactly what fixed mine.  I know it had something to do with the driver, and I seem to recall downloading an older driver for my card... You MAY be able to reinstall the original drivers that came with the card itself, if you still have the cd that came with it.  Then not update the driver at all.  That may work.

NVidia supports the industry standard format for DDS, NWN does not.  That standard has improved, but to be honest, not enough to really make much difference in what you see, the issue is that the head data at the top of the dds file is different for the industry standard stuff... NWN was created a LONG time ago by industry standards and written for hardware that is now considered very outdated.

Anyway, good luck with it.
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Drethnor]

               Yeah I found it odd that I had the same problem on not just 3 different cards but 3 different pc's. I would love to find a fix on the computer/driver side and not have to work around it by exporting a crap load of tga to the override.. But anyways thanks for the info.