[Not a Bug] Splotch of Color?

[Surferminn]

I don't know if someone already reported this, but on the underside of the coral, circled in yellow is a splotch of different color than the rest of the underside of the coral. The splotchiness is very close to the same color as the rock it sits on so I'm not sure if this is on purpose or if someone's paintbrush colored over the line and onto the underside of the coral or maybe the coral has a disease or some fungi is growing there. Just checking.

[henemly]

Appears to be a fungus that was on the original one.
Or, maybe a 'hole' in it.

[Wizwad]

That's a feature of that particular coral, Minn. If you check back to the original coral in 1 & 2-2.6 you'll see it there, too. The elephant ear coral was deemed to be too much of a feature of MA to ditch for the new version, so it was kept - but converted to 3D.

[Surferminn]

In the recent beta, when I press F to open windowed MA3 (note this is the "normal" size, not me stretching it to another windowed size), I noticed the bubble coral has a break out of dark gray splotches like measles or chicken pox or something. Here are 2 photos scrolled on the right and left side. It looks much darker in the live MA3 than in the attached single shot photos.

[Jim Sachs]

Any chance of getting a higher-res shot of that area? I have no idea what could be causing this. I changed the bubble coral texture at Beta 7a to get rid of the dark outlines around some of the sections, but didn't change anything in 7b or 7c. Do the spots stay the same color if the background is turned up and down?

[Surferminn]

I'm afraid I dropped out of beta testing for a little bit so didn't notice these things til I got back in recently so don't know if they were in earlier beta versions. Hard to get higher-res shot because this only happens in windowed mode.
- If I stretch the windowed mode vertically so you have a column, and some lengths vertically inbetween, the spotches disappear. They are not noticeable in the larger sized bubble coral.
- If I turn the background lights up,via F2, the spots become much much lighter.
- At first I thought it was the faint color of gray becoming compressed into a dark dot, but then sitting there pressing F over and over and trying to eyeball the exact location of the dots in the bubble coral between its full size and the windowed size leads me to think not, something about the space inbetween the bubbles created when scrolling....

Sorry didn't reply earlier, was working today and didn't get home til later this evening. Had posted above just before I left for work this morning.

[Ralph]

You seem to have the a blotch on the white coral next to the sand as well

[Jim Sachs]

I'm totally stumped on this one. Anyone else experiencing this?

[Surferminn]

Ok, here are some more pics working with this. The brain coral was a tad easier to document. You may have to click on the pics to enlarge bigger.
Note the size of the windowed mode on the upper left hand corner if it helps.

-- The first pic shows no splotches at all in circled areas 1, 2 and 3.

-- The 2nd pic shows the start of the splotch as I made window smaller - beginnings of light gray color splotching in areas 1, 2, and 3.

-- The 3rd pic shows more gray as I shrunk window smaller in areas 1, 2 and 3.

-- The 4th pic shows distinct splotches as I shrunk window smaller in areas 1, 2 and 3 with a 2nd splotch forming in area 1 beneath the 1st splotch in this area. Note that in this pic, you can also see tiny dot in area 4.

-- The 5th pic is the same size window as 4th pic EXCEPT that I SCROLLED over to the right at which point, the splotch in area 2 disappears which it shouldn't because you see more of area 2 there!! and the splotch in area 4 becomes bigger and darker!! My conclusion here is that perhaps some of the splotches can be eridicated from the photos used to create the different scenes when panning as some splotches disappears in different panning scenes. But that's just conjecture as I have no idea how you are doing this.

Again, you may have to click more than once to make pic bigger.

[Jim Sachs]

I don't think that this has anything to do with my code. It could be a physical problem with the memory bytes in your card's frame buffer. You've circled the obvious spots, but if you look closely they are everywhere - most are just camouflaged by mottled areas of the background.

Thanks for all the work you've put into documenting this, but unless someone else can duplicate it, I'm going to assume it's a one-machine-only problem.

[cjmaddy]

I've tried to reproduce this fault, but failed. - However small I make the window, (down to 426x246), I still see no dark splotches, - sorry, Minn!

I can only suggest that other Radeon users try reducing the size of their window, to see if this is restricted to ATI cards or drivers.

[Surferminn]

Lol.... what.... I'm the only one seeing spots....!?!?! Okay, fair enough. I can live with this. It may be as you say my video card which is not exactly the highest or even mid range level, is incapable of storing all the data. Thanks for the reply and thanks Cliff for attempting to replicate this.