Water surface graphical glitch

[Drift]

Hi everyone, just having another little glitch with Aquaria.

Firstly, here's a picture, I acctually had to go into "window" mode to take it, as in full screen when I used the screenshot button it would take a picture of my desktop and ignore the fact the game was running. Not sure if that info is relevent at all, but it is odd



Now, I just got a new PC, my old PC was a 3.2ghz PC with a 9800XT and never had this problem. The new one is using a duel core e6750 with an HD3870 GPU, 4GB's of ram, running Vista Buisness 64bit.

Now for some details, as you can see, the water is kinda black, but only half of it. As you swim downward, the whole water ends up going black, as you swim up, it turns to it's normal reflecitvness, if you jump out of the water, as you get higher it goes black again. So, further away you are from the surface plane, the worse it gets. As you can see, on the left side for some reason there isn't a problem, it seems able to reflect the cliff there just above the water, so it's probably an angle thing...

I was using an unpatched version of the game yesterday, and the whole water plane was black at all times, I noticed in the forum a reocmendation from Alec to upgrade to the newest patch to fix the problem, now with the newest patch, the water acctually is perfectly fine at 1024*768, it only seems to cause problems when I go in and change the config file to make it 1600*1200 (haven't tested other resolutions as the screen ends up offset at odd places). So, taking a completely random stab here but maybe it has to do with the number of pixels between the surface of the water, the character and the angle of whatever it's trying to reflect? It would kinda explain why the cliff is reflected on the left side... But yeah I have no idea how your algorithm for that even works so I'm no doubt completely of the mark

Anyway, hope to get some info on this! Your latest patch was obviously on the right track somewhere.

[IceD]

Well, it's quite an odd effect, but i seen familiar gliches in other games running on integrated graphic cards, but you have a radeon, as I see. Imho, Aquaria was optimized to use geforce graphic chipsets rather than radeon ones. I'm using a Gigabyte Geforce 8600GTS and Aquaria runs perfectly, my friend also had a problems with radeon, but it was a older 9800 series card.

I can't help you much. Sometimes some games just doens't run perfectly on every configuration, even if evereyone says it should. It's just everything, all pc's are about - you can't be never sure about your computer specs.

[Hiro]

Well if it runs fine at 1024*768 then it would seem to me that the problem would reside with you changing the aspect ratio. I can't really help here though...

Although, Alec was working on making widescreen support. When that gets put in I'm sure this thing would be resolved one way or another. Untill then, I play on windowed so I don't know if I would get the same problem as you.

[Clawy]

I also get the black water surface reflection, when playing at resolutions greater than 1280x768. I am using version 1.1.1 of the game on Windows 7 64-bit RC. I have a Nvidia GeForce 8800 GT video card with version 190.68 of the drivers installed.

[Alphasoldier]

Did ya try to put Vsync on and off and/or updating your video card drivers?

[Clawy]

On further testing, the problem only occurs on resolutions 1680x1050 and 1920x1080, I have tested with the vsync option on and off, both in the Aquria config program and the drivers. The drivers I am using are quite recent, there are newer drivers but they have known issues with windows 7 RC. I have captured a screen shot and uploaded it to ImageHosting http://img527.imageshack.us/img527/8083/blackwaterreflection.png here. Warning, it is quite large, just under 1 megabyte, this was intentional, to show the detail on the left side of image. Other than this, I have not noticed any graphical issues.

[Garcin]

Sorry to gravedig but I wanted to mention I have the same problem playing at 1920x1080 fullscreen with or without VSync. It's a shame because the game is gorgeous otherwise. This also does not happen at 1440x900 windowed.