TMPE overlays not showing

Article verified: August 2019

Symptoms

When selecting a tool on TM:PE menu bar, the overlays (vehicle restriction icons, lane arrows node selector circles, etc) are not appearing.
You will probably see similar issues when trying to build roads or rails

Cause

This is due to an issue with your graphics card not supporting shaders that the game requires.

You will likely see something like this in the game log file:

WARNING: Shader Unsupported: 'Hidden/Dof/DX11Dof' - Pass '' has no vertex shader
WARNING: Shader Unsupported: 'Hidden/Dof/DX11Dof' - Setting to default shader.

And you will probably see huge numbers of warnings in the log, like this:

d3d: failed to create 2D texture id=66947 w=1 h=1 mips=3 d3dfmt=21 [invalid call]

Most commonly this is due to Intel graphics - they are not complete graphics card; it's just a virtual graphics device running on the CPU.

Solution

There is no guaranteed solution, but there are a few things we can try...

If the issue only affects road and rail building, see: Flickering blue road building guides
If interface text is missing (usually on Timed Traffic lights panel), see: Interface text missing
TM:PE 10.20.1 and earlier: If lane arrow buttons are missing, see: Lane Arrows buttons missing arrows

If you're still having problems, you could try the following:

Make sure your graphics card drivers are fully updated.
If your computer has more than one graphics card (eg. integrated graphics and dedicated graphics):
- Set the computer to use the dedicated graphics card
- For more information, see Hardware > Graphics in Performance Tuning Guide
If you still have problems, try either (not both) the -force-d3d9 (DirectX 9) or -force-glcore (OpenGL) Launch Options
- If you have Intel UHD Graphics (Shader model 30 or above), however, don't use either of those launch options as it now supports the Hidden/Dof/DX11Dof DirectX 11 shaders. Note, however, that it's really, really, slow.