Planets and suns

Draco_Caeles · Post by **Draco_Caeles** » Fri Apr 28, 2006 6:46 pm

Since I installed the Unicode version of Oolite, I've been getting this problem:

Rather unusual to see the sun THROUGH a planet. There've also been a few instances where black squares appeared: you can see them here, a trail of them across the face of the sun.

Apologies if this has already been fixed.

JensAyton · Post by **JensAyton** » Sat Apr 29, 2006 10:23 am

There’s clearly something weird about the planet rendering code, but I haven’t seen that one before.

lex_talionis · Post by **lex_talionis** » Sat Apr 29, 2006 12:38 pm

well that's pretty interesting, to say the least. the nearest i've ever come to that is when, leaving the dock of a station, there's been a second's lag or so between the sun being drawn, and the planet being drawn... nothing that dramatic though.

Draco_Caeles · Post by **Draco_Caeles** » Sat Apr 29, 2006 8:01 pm

It's not just when it's leaving the station; I've seen it at other times too. After a hyperspace jump, in the middle of fights - it seems systemic.

JensAyton · Post by **JensAyton** » Sat Apr 29, 2006 9:24 pm

It strikes me that this could be an artifact of low Z buffer depths (i.e. 16 bits), although that should only happen on pretty ancient hardware. it would also require the game to be rendering the planet, then the sun, then the atmosphere. It shouldn’t be specific to the Unicode version, either.

…Unless dajt changed something about the GL context set-up in the Unicode build?

Post by **dajt** » Sun Apr 30, 2006 1:07 am

Nothing changed in the OpenGL setup.

Draco_Caeles · Post by **Draco_Caeles** » Mon May 01, 2006 12:14 pm

Not about planets and suns, but a similar problem so I thought I'd continue this thread instead of starting another one.

I saw my first Torus station today! Yay me!

Yeah, I need to get out more. But anyway, there were some drawing problems: faces in front of faces that they should have been behind, that sort of thing.

It's very pretty, though. *applauds Murgh*

I do feel a station coming on, though, now

JensAyton · Post by **JensAyton** » Mon May 01, 2006 12:56 pm

It looks, again, as though z-buffering isn’t working. I have no idea why this should be, though.

Murgh · Post by **Murgh** » Mon May 01, 2006 5:29 pm

unless someone went crazy bumping into it, something is quite off.

z-buffering is it?
are you on a PC, Draco?

Draco_Caeles · Post by **Draco_Caeles** » Mon May 01, 2006 6:16 pm

'Fraid so... I'm one of the poor lower orders, y'see...

I've had all sorts of graphical problems since I started using the Unicode-friendly release. Some you see above. Others I've encountered today include:

* rolling my ship and finding my view obscured by a texture (grey Cobra Mk I), as if the shiup were folded inside-out;

* entire planets disappearing (but show up on the radar, thank the Gods);

* stations vanishing except for the rectangular docking port, then after flicking between front view and Commander screen and back again, reappearing as a set of lights (this was a Torus station, btw);

* ships hanging in space and 'waggling' (rolling 30 degrees starboard, then from that to 30 degrees port, rinse and repeat...) - this happened on two different ships, a Cobra I and a Krait...

... in the words of one of the South Park characters, "Dude! This is pretty f***ed up right here!"

The graphics problems started after I installed the Unicode version. I'm running an nVidia Ti4200 (as I said, I'm poor, I can't afford any better

). It's... man, it's weird.

lex_talionis · Post by **lex_talionis** » Mon May 01, 2006 6:20 pm

the planets disappear?! MENTAL!

a reali life 'hidden planet'

aegidian · Post by **aegidian** » Mon May 01, 2006 6:23 pm

Probably an idea to check you have the most recent drivers for that graphics card, it sounds as if the OpenGL implementation for it is *cough* slightly sub-standard.

aegidian · Post by **aegidian** » Mon May 01, 2006 6:26 pm

Another issue *might* be caused by where dajt draws the text (on the z axis). If it's at some phenomenal depth then that could throw out the granularity of a floating point z-buffer.

Draco_Caeles · Post by **Draco_Caeles** » Mon May 01, 2006 6:26 pm

Well, I only inherited the card a few weeks ago, downloaded and installed the latest available drivers from nVidia at the time. And it's a recent rebuild of Windows XP, with DirectX 9.0c, as well.

Interestingly, here's some text from the readme file:

Readme file wrote:
Oolite snapshot build of svn revision 445 (2006-04-19)
...
The code this release is made from was branched before the texture fixes
were made, so it has all the usual texture problems the Windows port used
to suffer from.

Hu nu?

Draco_Caeles · Post by **Draco_Caeles** » Mon May 01, 2006 6:27 pm

Oh, another thing. Did you know that cargo containers can outpace a ship at full power?