Hey guys. Not sure if any of you remember me, but I'm the guy that used to build Star Trek levels for MotS, but never finished any of them.

Anyway, I recently bought a new computer and installed an NVidia GeForce 8500 on it and loaded up all my old editing projects and JK and MotS. However, the dynamic lighting is not rendering correctly. It's rendering very under par. Instead of smooth lighting, I get this kind of ugly 256 color broken type rendering. And yes, I have set all graphic detail options to the proper setting within MotS and on my NVidia control panel. Anyone know what's going on?

Is this in the stock levels or in your custom levels? I seem to remember something like this happening to me a long time ago, if I remember right is had to do with the colormaps being set wrong. It's been awhile though.

It's more apparent in the custom levels, but even the stock levels seem to be rendering a little more harshly than I remember.

The game is also having trouble rendering some transparent surfaces. Maybe MotS is so finally outdated that it doesn't run correctly on newer video cards. I'm going to try installing an older video card and see what kind of difference it makes. Sigh.

Okay. I unistalled my new video card and booted up the computer using it's integrated NVidia 6150 LE card. MotS ran beautifully like it used to.

So the problem is the new card. It must not like ancient games. Any suggestions?

I am glad to see you back, BSR. Unfortunately, I know nothing that could help solve your video card problem. :S

Have the same problem on my 8800GT. I'm pretty sure I know what the problem is though. This is the dithering problem with shadows right?

A lot of buzz has surrounded another game from this era, thief, or its dark engine. (also used in SS2) There is plenty of discussion and speculation in this thread.
http://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=113501

Long story short, both ATI and NVIDIAs latest generation of graphics cards seem to have this problem with 16-bit rendering games. In nvidia's case, the 7 and 6 series have the problem when using newer drivers as well IIRC. It is unclear whether its a driver or hardware problem, probably a driver one though. I would not hold my breath on it getting fixed. Timeslip has some kind of exe or direct3d hack that forces a 32-bit render target...which solves the colors but introduces some other problems. Its covered in detail in another popular thread within that forum.

Didn't some one make an OpenGL wrapper, maybe that would help? I can't find it anywhere right now.

I also now have a widescreen monitor...JK cuts off the bottom and top when using widescreen resolutions.