Rendering Artifacts

Steven Nentwig (Steven!)

Sometimes I get strange artifacts rendering maps. This mostly happens with overland and city maps. Enabling antialiasing only makes it worse. At first I thought the issue was that I have too many sheets layered on top of each other, but the same effect happens with only one sheet on a background. Does anyone have a clue what might be causing this issue?

Loopysue

That's transparency acne.

Sometimes when the pixels in an overlying texture are the same colour as the pixels in the underlying texture, and there is a glow, edge fade, inner, or bevel of either type on the overlying texture's sheet, the rendering engine gets confused and fails to recognise there's anything there on the overlying sheet. So it's read as a pinhole exactly one pixel in dimension. That's why the holes are all the same size.

I have noticed that this is quite frequent with SS5, where all the fills have lots of little black marks, and are all quite similar greens and yellows.

You can try placing a new sheet with nothing on it between those two sheets which does sometimes work, or if it doesn't, copy the overlying polygons onto that new sheet along with the sheet effects. That can also sometimes work without further effort. If that doesn't work either, try changing the fills of the new copy polygons to Solid, and a colour that isn't in either texture. If you have to go that far you may need to increase the width of the edge fade to make sure it doesn't show through.

Steven Nentwig (Steven!)

Thanks for explaining. I'll tweak the sheets and see if it helps. I also noticed this happening the most with MS styles.

Steven Nentwig (Steven!)

Adding in empty sheets in between didn't work unfortunately, but copying the polygons to a new sheet with the same effects did the trick. Thanks for the tip!