Half-Life 2: Episode 1 Forum

Ok I noticed that the mac nvidia drivers have had the chain link fence texture fixed. Although there are a three more textures that I noticed that don't work.
In Counter-Strike Source de_port, there you can see that railings don't show up all the time, then the road guards don't render correctly.
In Episode One on the mission 'low life' the cage doors that you have to use the crank to open, don't render as well.
I just thought that the solution could be solved if the chain linked fence could be fixed.
Also Episode Two and Portal won't save my video settings when I exit, it just starts up in 1024x768 with the recommended advanced settings. Team Fortress Two isn't affected by it either. I was wondering if there was a way to fix that, it's a simply problem.
Also portal and Ep2 require -dxlevel 80 in the startup options to work, but that was mentioned in another forum. Other then that I haven't seen any problems, although I expect I might find more texture problems since I haven't played through all of Half-Life 2 in Crossover Games.

Hi,
I can probably answer the issue with the reset settins. As you said, you added -dxlevel 80 to work around a crash. This causes the settings to be reset each start. After starting the game once with -dxlevel 80, you can remove it and the game will stick to dxlevel 80 and leave your settings as you set them.

I don't quite understand - are the problems with the partially transparent(alpha tested) textures fixed? I mean the problem with the chain link fence. If not, I suspect it can cause many of the other problems you're reporting. The last time we tested it, the driver still had this bug. (The bug here is that the alpha test incorrectly discards fragments coming from the pixel shader. Maybe a failed optimization)

Meanwhile, I have isolated the dxlevel 81 crash. We'll try to get a fixed build out as fast as possible, probably after the Wine release next Friday when we merge the new code in. I've reported the bug to Apple as well, I hope they fix it some day...

Thanks for answering.
Okay I see your solution to the transparent textures and why these aren't working.
The railings and road guards don't have shaders coming through unlike the fences and grating. So your solution doesn't work. I'm still puzzled by the Episode 1 issue. In Episode Two your solution was very visible, the fences I saw just had white in the transparent areas (looked like they were in an apple commercial). 😉
I also get some random Team Fortress Two and Half-Life 2 Multiplayer Mod crashes. I might try -dxlevel 80 or lower the settings from insane.
Hope you get this issue fixed. The ending of Episode Two was glorious! I've given a few referrals to people for Crossover Mac (Former PC users that want CS).

I wish you good luck with crossover games!,
David

Hi,
We didn't fix anything for the fences, we're still hoping Apple or Nvidia fix the driver. We haven't even been able to isolate the problem in a test case.

Just as a general note, you so not see "shaders" in the graphics world. A shader is a program which runs on the GPU. You can't see it on the screen.

An example for a very simple D3D pixel shader is:
ps_1_4
texld r0, t0
mul r0, t0, v0

It reads from a texture, multiplies the color(range 0 to 1) with the vertex color from lighting(range 0 to 1) and writes the result to the screen.