Major Fog Problem, help??

[raptor2386]

Some people know what I'm talking about. (On unpatched game) In certain areas, the Inclinator and Sak's Hangar I've seen so far, the graphics are corrupted to showing a single shaded color on every single texture within a certain distance of the character, giving the illusion of a thick, dense fog. The fog is white/tan in the Inclinator and blue in Sak's Hangar. The game still runs fine, but this fog makes it very hard to see things up close (everything a certain distance away shows up normal). I don't like this. So I updated my video driver and installed the 1.2 patch. When I loaded my save (Heron Building) now I had dark purple fog, and it stretched FARTHER! The wall and floor at the end of a long corridor looked normal, everything else like I was in some dusk sky. Heron's ran very smoothly, but when I started a new game it ran VERY slow. No fog in Alex's Apartment thankfully, but I don't know about the rest. What gives? How the heck can I play this game with normal graphics? It runs consistenly otherwise, and hasn't crashed at all.

Dell Latitude D600
32 MB Ati Radeon 9000 Mobility
512 MB RAM
1.7 GHz Intel Pentium M

I've updated the Radeon driver, and Catalyst drivers don't work for notebooks. So don't tell me to get Catalyst updated, because it's not supported.

Edit: It's not purple fog after all, but a problem with lighting. This problem occurs (to my knowledge) in Upper Seattle and Heron's. The distance of effect is huge...there is normal lighting at the end of a long corridor but anything closer is reduced to the darkest lighting settings, it looks like. I can still see everything but it's really dark, and the overall background color of DXIW is dark purple/blue anyway (night) so that's why it appeared to be purple fog. By the way, the Inclinator STILL has the tan fog. So all the patch did for me was add a new lighting problem and fix nothing. HELP??

I'm seeing the exact same problem. I'm just past the inclinator now (that was a bit tough to do when you can't see much). The inclinator has a light brown/tan color and lower seattle now has a blueish color. I have the 1.2 patch, played around with DX:IW Tweaker, and other settings but it doesn't fix it. And I know it isn't something I did, because if I go to any save from areas before the inclinator, everything works perfectly.

I have a similar notebook setup to raptor2386 so the Radeon 9000 may be part of the problem. I've got:

Gateway 450XL
1.7Ghz Pentium M
1024 MB RAM
64MB ATI Radeon 9000 Mobility
WinXP Pro

Anyone else have any ideas?

[raptor2386]

Eidos tech support said I need a driver dated after November 2003...Dell's latest driver is August 2003 (a little behind schedule if you ask me) so essentially us Radeon Mobility 9000 users would have to wait until Dell decides to update.

I saw a post relating this problem in a Dell forum, and it made reference to Catalyst, which isn't supported for notebooks (INF files block its installation). So I downloaded an ATI Mod Tool and modded my drivers to work with Catalyst, and now I have Catalyst 4.7 running with no errors or problems whatsoever. This improves the framerate of DXIW for me, so I have now constant 30-40 fps. Problem is, it doesn't fix anything BUT framerate. You would think Catalyst 4.7 is newer than November 2003, wouldn't you? It is designed to work with Radeon 9000, it doesn't have any compatibility issues, and tech support says you should always have the latest Catalyst drivers...

Basically I have done everything Tech Support (and this forum) has told me to do and it has done NOTHING. But I won't give up on this game...not yet.

The drivers Gateway gives are from September 2003, so they're probably similar drivers to what you had. I'll have to look into that ATI Mod Tool and see if it does anything for me.

Just throwing out ideas, but I think it may have to do with the lighting. Changing lighting to low, medium or high doesn't work though. I noticed that when you hit escape (and it dims the lighting and shows the menu), the textures go back to normal. I also noticed that when loading a saved game, it flashes the correct textures for a split second and then puts on the overlay.

There's gotta be a way to fix this!


Edit: I installed the Catalyst 4.7 drivers with the ATI Mod Tool (at http://www.driverheaven.net/patje/ for those interested) and am seeing the same effects as raptor. Better frame rate, but no change in the weird colored textures/fog.

Edit 2: I tried installing the Hi Res Texture Pack to see if that would work. Sadly it didn't, but now things look better during the times when the colored fog isn't there.

Edit 3: Fixed it! Sort of. Its not a perfect fix, but I uninstalled, reinstalled, and then installed the v1.1 patch. I've tried uninstalling and reinstalling before, but it was always with v1.2. This must be some kind of problem with the newest patch. With only the v1.1 patch the game runs perfectly. Hopefully this will help raptor too.

[raptor2386]

1.1 patch didn't work, either. I don't get it, what the hell is wrong with my card that makes it different from yours? It took away the dark lighting problem but the Inclinator fog is still there. It appears in small doses in the Biomod Lab in Tarsus, I've also noticed. I'm not gonna play through the game until I can fix this artifact, any other suggestions?

Hi,

I had the same problem, this fixed it for me:

right click on your desktop, click on properties, setttings, advanced, 3D. Move the slider to High Quality for both Direct3D and OpenGL. Hope this helps.

[raptor2386]

Thanks for the tip, but unfortunately that did nothing.