denyerec.co.uk

A common problem experienced by 8800 owners in BF2 is that if they have their lighting and shaders set to “high” or “medium”, after a short while they get the dreaded Yellow Texture Bug, where things appear in flat yellow, then it gets worse and worse until it looks like a bad accident at the Birds factory, then the game will crash.

Turns out the same fix that sorts out the OS Page Pool Memory error in TF2 also alleviates the problem with BF2. Looks like the yellow textures might be proxies for when the game can’t pull the required textures out of swap fast enough. Or something…

Anyhow, the fix works as follows (The following was scoured off a TF2 help thread)

First load regedit. Remeber to back up your registry first, I take NO responsibility for any damage you may cause at all. Ever.

Start Menu > Run > regedit

Head down to this branch:
HKEY\_LOCAL\_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Contro l\Session Manager\Memory Management

Then find this key on the right hand side: REG_DWORD “PagedPoolSize”

Double click on “PagedPoolSize”. Hexadecimal is listed first.
Change the “Value Data” to one of these below:
Note: You only need to enter EITHER Hexadecimal or Decimal.

Code:

Megabytes Hexadecimal Decimal
192Mb 0c000000 201326592
256Mb 10000000 268435456
384Mb 18000000 402653184

As I’ve got 4gb of system memory, I set mine to 384mb and left it at that. Apparently it’s not wise to go above 400mb, though I’m unsure of the technical implications.

If this doesn’t work for you, try the 169.04 beta drivers from Nvidia, as I’m running those also. Now to find out if this fixes the Jinx in Bioshock…

Update:
Yes, indeed this also fixed the high-detail-shader issue on Bioshock. Whoo-hoo!

I’ve been playing Team Fortress 2 a little lately, and it’s most entertaining. As some of you may know, it being a Valve game, the option to “spraypaint” a tag onto the walls is present as it was in Counterstrike, however, creating these custom images for use can be a bit of a pain.

First of all, you’ll need something like Photoshop. GIMP will do, but these instructions are for Photoshop.
Next you’ll need VTF Edit, which you can get from the bottom of the VTF Edit website. It’s a lot cheaper than Photoshop…

• Now open Photoshop. Create a blank 256×256 RGB 8-bit image.
• Fill this image with mid-grey R 128, G 128, B 128.
• Create a new layer on top of this, and draw / add whatever you want to it. Delete from this layer any bits you want to be transparent in the final spray image
• Press CTRL and click the layer you’re drawing on in the layers pallete, this selects only what you’ve drawn onto the layer
• On the Channels tab, click the second button from the left to “Create alpha channel from selection”
• Go back to the layers tab. Click Layer->Flatten Image
• Now save the image as a TGA file, make sure Alpha Channels is ticked, hit OK and select “32 bit” if a little dialog pops up
• Open VTF Edit, go to File->Import and select your TGA file
• In the dialog that appears, uncheck “Generate Mipmaps” and leave everything else default. Alpha Format should read ‘DXT5′. Hit OK.
• To confirm that yout TGA alpha map worked OK, you can check View->Mask, which should turn on the alpha map preview
• Go to File->Save As and save the file

Once you’ve generated the VTF file you need to place it in two locations:

• \Steam\steamapps\ \team fortress 2\tf\materials\VGUI\logos\
• \Steam\steamapps\ \team fortress 2\tf\materials\VGUI\logos\UI\

If the folders don’t exist, then just create them. As far as I can tell, it is case sensitive, so watch out for that. When you’re all done with that, load TF2 and go to the Advanced tab on the options page and select your spray tag image.

Simple… 😉

Update:
Blagpuss points out that some users might need to add “_english” to the ‘tf’ portion of the path, this might vary for users with other regionalised copies too, so watch out for that.