funny you should ask, i just downloaded the demo a couple of days ago and had the same issue. my pc isnt that great though so i figured that was to blame. plenty of ram though.

everything appeared pretty much black and white, except for items and pickups.

bit ot but... people still playing q4? lolz :<

it was more perverse curiosity.

haha...

well that's great that I'm not alone here... It's not our PCs because the full version of Quake 4 I remember running without this bug...

I had some spare time so I actually made a video that shows the bug in action which can be viewed here.

non-html - whoops...

video is here

As they say, a picture paints a thousand words.

That is the missing image shader you are seeing. Almost certainly the issue is simply that the demo build has some of the non-precompressed textures (ie, ultra gfx) missing. This is simply a packaging issue, and the fix is to upgrade to playing the full version.

lol

Thanks for your reply.

Try to update your video drivers

WAIT Q4 HAS BUGS?

no, q4 is a bug

i know it's a little late to talking about quake 4...

however my intent was not to inform you, personally, about this bug. i'm looking for a fix.

What OS? What video card? What driver version?

for me it's XP 32 SP2, 7800 gtx & 182.08 whql.

must be the new drivers, as this isn't widely heard of and the guy below me had no problems on older drivers.

Its not drivers. As I said, its missing textures from the demo pk4's.

If you like, you can prove this to yourself the same way I just did. Get your system in the state where it doesnt work, and then go to the console, and type "developer 1". Then, "vid_restart". This will make it try to reload all textures. You'll get more spam on the console because of the developer setting, so you might want to use "condump messages.txt" so that you can read it more comfortably.

You'll get some bits like this:

reloading addnormals( textures/tram/tr_wall_01_local, heightmap( textures/tram/tr_wall_01_h, 1)).
WARNING: Failed to read "textures/tram/tr_wall_01_local" during 'addnormals' parse!
WARNING: Couldn't load image: addnormals( textures/tram/tr_wall_01_local, heightmap( textures/tram/tr_wall_01_h, 1))

I've just confirmed that textures/tram/tr_wall_01_local.tga is in my full 1.4.2 installation (pak012.pk4) but not in the demo pak001.pk4.

The reason it works fine with bumpmaps disabled is that generates a fixed normalmap.

(its probably worth you being aware that many "warnings" that are generated by developer 1 are completely normal and do not indicate something wrong, which is why they were moved to developer only)

It could be that the older drivers report something that makes Q4 believe your card doesn't actually support the requirements for ultra, and so its failing to even try to use ultra mode, and actually its the same as high.

I figured you had it correct the first time, but then this guy says he used Ultra with older drivers... Then I tested with the drivers he used (178.24) and it made absolutely no difference. He must have been running High, or perhaps it's as you said - that the game is incorrectly recognizing a less qualified video card.

Thanks very much for your elaborate reply. I guess there's nothing we can do about this beside buy the game.

Yep. Or perhaps just be happy with "High" anyway, as I doubt you can see the compression artifacts in the bumpmaps.

Hm, I should probably check the definition of high. You could perhaps pick "ultra" and then set image_useCompression 1. If that isn't identical to high, then that might get you a compromise, as it is only an issue because its not using the compressed textures.

Base normal maps (foo_local) can suffer a lot from compression, think big fat squares with a very different normal around rivets and sharp details. This can be compounded with mipmapping ! (I think JC talked about this somewhere, but I can't remember where)

In D3, I could significantly improve the quality by changing the image_ cvar related to normal compression while still playing with downsizelimit 256 and having the diffuse and specular compressed.
More so than keeping compressed normals and uncompressed diffuse maps. Now the lighting isn't always as harsh in Q4 as it is in D3 so YMMV !

Also wrt. high/ultra : I'm not too sure, but I *think* high might have downsize on with a large image size (ie 1024) while ultra does not downsize (aside of the lack of compression). Am a bit rusty on this so I'll have to check later on.

And yeah, there's a chance Q4 doesn't detect hardware too good. My c2d + geforce 9600m is recognized as "low" and it doesn't turn smp on by default :)

Hm, good point - now you mention it, I remember JC's comments - and it makes sense from a compression perspective too.

I'm still not completely convinced that your average gamer would notice the difference tho ;)

im playing the 1.4.2 demo for some time now and i don't have those problems.

I recorded a video some time ago, every settings was on max:
http://www.wipido.com/video/jSryHbQqTZsg

I have a 7900GS with 178,24 whlq on XP SP3. and i have no problems.

thanks for your reply.

On a more serious note,

I think it has more to do with video drivers then q4 itself.

That's all I can say without emulating the same problem with my own comp.

On a more serious note, read #18 ;)

You are the developer here so I bow to thee!

Still, it was a good amateur guess :D

Yea, and it was my first guess too, before I saw the video of what the "fucked up" textures look like. :)

I was actually expecting the vista blurred issue mentioned by #26 (which I thought was a driver thing, caused by using the MS provided drivers rather than latest from the card manufacturer, rather than a permissions issue, but since there are other permissions issues maybe it is?).

thanks for the explanation AnthonyJ.

my cousin had the same problem, only the texture are in place, yet looking abit blurry. the same as your weapon detail. we solved this issue by making the Quake4 folder non-read only.

ofc that was with vista =/