Shadows look blue and have noise

[Zeratai]

I had to reinstall SC4 recently and when going to night mode shadows turn blueish and look weird... Any help to fix that? I have simfox day n night mod.... Also my game ran very good before I reinstalled, I mean no blue shadows at night... Problem is with both Hardware and software render. Hope you can help me, thanks.

[HappyDays]

A picture and a description of your computer's hardware and current operating system may prove beneficial in the process of aiding you.

[APSMS]

The darknite mod works differently from the way Maxis night works.

To eliminate nighttime shadows, you need to have edited your graphics rules settings file so that low shadows turns them off instead. Then change to low shadows at night to remove the weird shadows.

[Zeratai]

Yes, thisonly occurs with night n day mod... but what stramnges memore is that before I reinstall the game, it worked perfectly. I didnt need to turn of shadows at night for pictures and shadows at night will still be visible but  more "darker"...

My specs are:

Intel core i5 @3.20hz
6gb RAM
WIN 7 Home Premium
I use intel chipset for graphics... I know this suck... but again, how the game looked so perfectly before reinstalling? I have the same mods. Even ran the game without mod and discovered it was the DnN mod but it never do that in the past.... Thanks for the help

[mgb204]

Despite the opinions of many, the Intel GPU is not terrible, there was a time when intergrated graphics were a terrible thing to have, but the last few generations are like having a free low-mid range GPU bundled on your CPU with low power usage and temperatures to boot. Whilst I'm sure the Intel GPUs are more than capable of handling the modest graphical requirements of SC4, the issue is that Intel's drivers are rather poor when it comes to legacy support, hence Hardware rendering in SC4 for many is out of the question using one.

I'm not sure how software rendering would affect the Day and Night mod, but in general it does cause for less than optimal experience graphically, in this case I could see how it may simply not do a good job of rendering night-time shadows. If you used the exact same PC before without problems, then I would take a guess perhaps a driver update for the Intel GPU is responsible for the change here. I've heard users report that some of the older Intel drivers worked fine with SC4/Hardware rendering, the problem is that getting old Intel drivers is very difficult, but you could try the driver rollback feature of Windows to return to a previous one and see if the issue is resolved.