No stars in 1.71.2

Baza · Post by **Baza** » Sun Jun 22, 2008 5:59 pm

All back ground stars have suddenly disappeared. Left with strange wispy triangles. Sometimes have large colured semi transparent squares. No oxps except tiger.
Have just updated ATI video drivers but unsure if this occurred after this or just before.

ATI radeon HD2600XT
Have a screen shot but unsure how to post?

Cmdr. Maegil · Post by **Cmdr. Maegil** » Sun Jun 22, 2008 6:23 pm

You have to put it on a uploader such as photobucket, then you post the url between [img] commands.

Griff · Post by **Griff** » Sun Jun 22, 2008 7:02 pm

have a look at the last few posts in this thread:
https://bb.oolite.space/viewtopic.php?t=4738

you might be getting the same problem s8404755 was having:

s8404755 wrote:
Nebulae/space background no longer displays - instead I get a random spattering of intersecting, multi-coloured, shaded, translucent squares of varying size and intensity.... ...reducing the anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering to 2x in the ATI control center fixed the problem.

s8404755 · Post by **s8404755** » Sun Jun 22, 2008 10:26 pm

Yes indeed - that is exactly the same problem I am getting.

At the moment It's happening about 1 in 3 starts of the game. I'm starting with shift held down and that seems to give it a better chance of starting up ok (but I could be imagining that). Whatever the problem is, it prevents the textures from System Redux.OXP from showing as well but the textures on the ships work fine so that might give someone a clue as to what's going on...

Anyway - you're not the only one, mate. I'm secretly hoping that this problem will turn out to be wider spread than just the two of us ...

Martin

Baza · Post by **Baza** » Mon Jun 23, 2008 10:09 pm

Thanks for all the replies. Cahnging settings I am afraid made no difference.

s8404755 · Post by **s8404755** » Mon Jun 23, 2008 10:13 pm

Yes.

Having played with no problems for a few days, I can no longer get the stars to work at all!

I have tried re-installing, re-booting etc. nothing works.

Now the System Redux OXP textures sometimes work, but the stars don't or neither do...

s8404755 · Post by **s8404755** » Mon Jun 23, 2008 10:26 pm

and now the game planet textures don't work at all either. no matter how many times I re-boot or restart the game. it's like the more I play, the worse the problem gets.

What frustrates me is that I had it working and then it stopped working without any changes to the computer or the game. I really can't understand it...

Frame · Post by **Frame** » Tue Jun 24, 2008 8:08 am

s8404755 wrote:
and now the game planet textures don't work at all either. no matter how many times I re-boot or restart the game. it's like the more I play, the worse the problem gets.

What frustrates me is that I had it working and then it stopped working without any changes to the computer or the game. I really can't understand it...

This is a long shot, but is your computer getting hot, high temprature can cause instability... not knowing wheter you are on mac or pc, but what i do/ did when my computer got to hot, was to remove one of the side panels of the computer...

in another case i had to seperate the two harddrives so that they where not so close to each other, which made them get way to hot...

the later case could sound like something you could experience

Everything would be oright as long as the hard drive/s are at normal temprature, but once it gets to be to high, errors are being generated, which can cause odd effects to files being used.

s8404755 · Post by **s8404755** » Tue Jun 24, 2008 3:17 pm

No, there's definately nothing wrong with my computer. It's a Core 2 Duo so the CPU runs pretty low temp anyway (CPU <40c / GPU < 42c). Anyway everything else runs okay, including games, and I doubt Oolite could really push the PC anyway.

I am going to try moving it to a different HDD just to see...

It's all very strange.

TGHC · Post by **TGHC** » Tue Jun 24, 2008 5:33 pm

I know it's a long shot, but you could try downloading the latest version of Oolite again, I had a problem with a Belkin wireless router that misbehaved after an upgrade to its software, despite the download reporting it being completed successfully. It took about 8 hours on the phone with technical assistance to get to the bottom of it, and it turned out to be a minor corruption of the download.

Post by **another_commander** » Tue Jun 24, 2008 5:36 pm

I doubt that it could be a corrupt download. The installer performs self checks upon launch and it will simply refuse to start if its checksums are not correct.

TGHC · Post by **TGHC** » Tue Jun 24, 2008 5:54 pm

I said it was a long shot

Post by **another_commander** » Tue Jun 24, 2008 6:05 pm

s8404755: If it is not hardware related, then maybe you could give a try with the Omega drivers (http://www.omegadrivers.net). The other games that work well, are they using OpenGL or DirectX? It may simply be that your current drivers' OGL support is not good enough, while DX10 support is OK, so you would see DX10 games playing nice and OGL ones - like Oolite - behaving oddly.

Just an idea, if all else fails and you are willing to take the step. Do make a restore point before trying anything with new drivers, though.

Edit: I just saw that the ATI Omega drivers for Vista are not ready yet. Bummer. Well, maybe you can try it with the XP part of your dual boot, if you decide to give it a go.

s8404755 · Post by **s8404755** » Wed Jun 25, 2008 10:18 am

I'm not even sure any of my other games use OGL...

There must be something that's changing which making it stop working. There is a variable somewhere, I just don't know what it is. Strange that it went from intermitant to not working at all.

Also, the fact that it seems to be connected to system redux - the home planets texture not working - but sung's textures on the ships still work. That could tell someone who has knowledge of the game engine something.

Post by **another_commander** » Wed Jun 25, 2008 11:36 am

Just out of curiosity, how is 1.65 behaving if you run it now?

I will admit that part of the reasoning that follows is the easy way out because I don't have much time anymore to work on the code, but on the other hand, I find it terribly difficult to believe that there is a problem with the game code itself. Oolite 1.71 was released two months ago and an issue like this is too obvious to miss. The game runs without glitches on a wide variety of graphics hardware and it is only now that we have two reports of problematic skies, both on ATI HD family cards, and in the case of Baza, at about the time of updating drivers. To me, it sounds more like an OpenGL support related bug in the graphics driver (which is why I proposed the completely independent Omega drivers set as a possible solution). Having said that, I am really curious as to why exactly this happens, and if I manage to free up some time to investigate, I will give it a look.

Baza: Can you fall back to your previous driver installation and see if the issue gets fixed?

All users with ATI HD cards: I would be very interested to know how it runs on your systems and what version drivers you have.