Odd Persistent Shadow Glitch

[David Merrick]

Hey folks, since I reinstalled OG San Andreas on the PC I bought earlier this year (Windows 11 and an RTX 4060), I'm noticing this shadow along the ground that appears at a persistent distance in front of me in certain parts of the world map. You can see it first appear at 28 seconds in the video embedded below:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NOBQo-orqvE

This shadow appears regardless of what state the game is in: default install, downgraded to 1.0, or with all my mods installed. It's not hurting my ability to play the game but it is a bit distracting and I'm wondering if anybody else has encountered it and knows how to fix the issue.

Thanks for any help!

Windows 11
AMD Ryzen 7 5700X
32GB RAM
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 8GB VRAM

[StreamWhenGuy]

I assume Silent Patch was installed at some point.

[MrEWhite]

This is an issue with mipmaps (or lack thereof). Assuming you have modloader installed:
1. Get Magic.TXD.
2. Open it, go to Tools > Mass Conversion
3. Point the game root option to the models folder in your GTA SA directory
4. Point the output root to a new modloader directory's model folder (for example, GTA San Andreas/modloader/Mipmaps/models)
5. Make sure "Platform" is PC, "Game" is GTA SA, "Clear mipmaps" is unchecked, "Generate mipmaps" is checked and set to 15, "Improve filtering" is checked, "Compress textures" is unchecked, "Reconstruct IMG archives" is checked, and "Compressed IMG" is unchecked.
6. Click convert and let it run.
7. Boot the game, make sure Mipmaps is enabled in the video settings, and this issue should be resolved, as well as having significantly less shimmering and aliasing on textures due to the previous lack of mipmaps.

These steps can be followed on GTA 3 & VC as well by making sure the correct game is selected under the "Game" setting, and for VC specifically, make sure ViceMips by DK22Pac is installed. Having it installed on those games will also fix texture shimmering & aliasing.

[David Merrick]

@MrEWhite: I really appreciate this tip, however I followed all the steps and the shadows still appear in their usual place. I did receive the message "could not get a filesystem handle to the output root" in the log during the conversion. Am I to understand that I need to make a new (empty) "Mipmaps" folder in the San Andreas/modloader folder, and then a new (empty) "models" subfolder within that?

EDIT: oh god, I somehow conflated steps 3 and 4 and got confused. Redid it correctly and the shadows are gone! Thank you SO much!

@StreamWhenGuy: you would be correct, though this issue is still present in a non-Steam, non-Rockstar Games Launcher 1.0 version of the game.