Track Flooding Explained!

[Mat-Allum]

I'd like to say a few words about the mysterious Noah Phenomenon that has been plaguing us for years.

I tried this with JQ's BF14 SD original truck. I noticed that, with Reflections turned on, the water level (duh) comes up to that of the truck. And now I know why, I think. Look closely and you can see, in some circumstances, a vertex of the truck in the water's reflection is stretched several feet. I think the cause of the whole water thing is that when the game tries to draw reflections (even though the truck wouldn't be visible in some cases, it is still rendered), it can't handle more than 2000 verts. Sooooo, when it reaches one too many, it causes a display error that causes the reflection level (linked to the water level) to reach the same Y coordinate as the first vertex over 2000.

Now for something else. In the MTMG error list, there's also a listing for track flooding - that does not come up to truck level. This is caused by the same thing - a truck with too many vertices. This time, however, it is an opponent truck. This is where it gets interesting. The flooding is only re-drawn if the culprit truck is visible in the camera view. Therefore, if a culprit opponent truck causes it and is not in view, the water level stays where it is (too high lol), causing this strange effect.

I hope this is a good explanation of the mystery.

[Rep Fan]

I made a truck once, my 53 Power Wagon, and ran it with full reflections on, and at the time, it was only 1312 verts, and the whole track flooded over the roof of the truck.

So I dunno if your theory "holds water", *pun intended*. Yes the reflections are nice and all, but if want to run any add-on, regardless of verts, shut it off.

Only thing I can see that they are good for is making your screen shots looks purdy, other than that, they seem pretty useless to me. Especially if you're like me, and run in Cockpit mode, you never see what they are really doing for the game anyway.

I've even ran all stock trucks, full grid, all 8 trucks, on Crazy 98, and had it happen before. As many of us have mentioned before, this game was never perfected. It was going well thru most of it's creation, untill Microsoft wanted it all of a sudden finished yesterday, at the last minute. So I don't think, like alot of things about the game, just never quite got perfected.

So all in all, blame Bill Gate's staff for the Noah Effect, and the Rumbles instead of drags, and all the other problems you have with the game. If they woulda left TRI alone, and let them finish it the way they intended, we wouldn't even need guys like us that make add-ons, the game woulda been perfect right out of the box.

I think we've figured out a way around every problem this game has, and there is no way at the time, TRI or even Microsoft could have ever made this game as cool as WE did. We all deserve a pat on the back.

This game stopped being "their" game years ago, we perfected it, so we should be very proud.

[Mat-Allum]

Microsoft never even dreamed of a "fixmore" pod, they figure their patch is way better. I, for your information, have been using Fixmore4 for several days and MTM2 runs better than ever. They haven't even touched their web site for years - did you know that they've finally released a demo?

[Rep Fan]

Lol, yeah, sad isn't it? Especially when they took the place away that they wanted everyone to play it on...

We have no one to thank but ourselves.

No one has quite figured out exactly why the Noah Effect happens, but we have figured out how to stop it, and that's all that matters.

[Phineus]

<table cellspacing="1" cellpadding="3" border="0"><tr><td class="quote"> We have no one to thank but ourselves. </td></tr></table>

[Tyler Wysocki]

speaking of TRI, they seem to still be making "racing games", but just free downloads of promotional stuff for Jeep and such.