Oolite Bulletins

phrashee wrote:

from the External view Mine looks normal

maik wrote:

If I recall correctly, Griff's all-in-one OXP does not replace the original versions but adds his versions on top. So you see the standard Cobra Mk3 as in your first pic in the "show room" in the beginning, but if you wait long enough you will also see Griff's.

This also means you have to edit your player_ship to turn it from a standard Cobra III into a Griff Cobra III. There's a way to do this but offhand (and at work) I can't remember how ... someone will fill in the details shortly, no doubt!

There is an OXP here that will start a new Jameson in a Griff Cobra III. Or you'll have to edit your savefile slightly, as Disembodied said.

Open your savefile in a text editor and find these lines: Change it to: Save it, then restart Oolite holding the shift key down until the spinning Cobra appears.

Which is interesting because the logs state otherwise

But wait there's more, I got curious, I got a itching to try out Xdmx (multiheaded distributed desktop) as well as seeing full shaders so i went ahead and took the plunge and installed arch linux (that was fun!) oh yeah.......and after installing a minimal desktop (twm) i installed oolite) via pacman (via the advice on this page)

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Oolite

And Got some very intresting results.....

Here's some examples....

Thats a beautiful one



Another


A wierd problem that has shown up once in a while..

closer inspection of white nav buoy

A intresting issue, Those little white squiggles are also all over the ship, theres a lot more then what the picture represents (they resemble white television snow, my ships have snow crash!) again, happens once in a while.







Intresting, eh????

And another thing has crossed my mind, but I have been unable to find any documentation regarding whether I should enabled the following Options in my file.
the smooth_points and use dust shader ones,,,, I don't know whether to regard the comments as accurate since full shaders seems to (almost!) work quite well now I have arch linux installed..

"Intel GMA 900/950 family" =
{
match =
{
vendor = "Tungsten|Intel";
/* "GMA<anything>9##" (or 8##) but not 9###. N.b. the Tunsgten
Mesa drivers use the chipset number (which may start with
rather than the graphics engine number.
*/
renderer = "(Intel|GMA).*\\b[89]\\d{2}(?!\\d)";
};
maximum_shader_level = "SHADERS_FULL";
default_shader_level = "SHADERS_SIMPLE";
smooth_points = false; // Point smoothing is not supported in hardware.
use_dust_shader = false; // Vertex shaders are emulated on CPU.
};

I will post more info once I have a more comprehensive install of arch linux installed (right now its the arch base, X windows, Mesa and tools and oolite only)

cheerz
phrashee

The missing texture (and some poor rendering on the planet behind it) suggest to me that your GPU is struggling with the full shaders, especially if it sometimes renders fine. Have you run through the complete demoships parade at start-up to see if everything looks as it should?

Nice healthy frame rate.

The white squiggles may be to do with not using the dust-shader. You may as well give it a try with those entries changed/ removed in gpu-settings.plist.

edit to add - it's worth checking latest.log for any errors when you spot graphical anomalies.
You can also enable some additional graphical logging by editing logcontrol.plist..

rendering.opengl.error = yes;

If you can see Griff ships, the white nav buoy shouldn’t be a shader issue. It could be a texture memory shortage.

It might be helpful if you could run the Material Test Suite.

Right, ok a couple of notes before I drive batty by posting yet another set of images.

The All white texture issues only happens it seems with the Nav Buoy and sometimes on startup with the Cobra mk iii (Default) image.
(this after lots and lots of testing and sweating)

There are no errors listed after enabling rendering.open gl or whatever it is to yes or at least nothing that appears to be a error to me....

Another interesting note, is sometimes oolite seems to stop all animation when loading images from the hard drive on the arch build of it.... It's very annoying and i remember it being a issue that annoyed me from the old days. Why it is not present on Linux mint Debain Edition is Beyond me, but then again the lack of any Full shaders effects whatsoever using linux mint was weird as well .....

I would love to post some images, but for that i have to log in to linux mint as the Pacman4 package manager Sucks at Queries by keyword, you would think searching by the keyword web or browser would produce some sort of result right????, and I'm not ready to install a Full fledged Desktop Environment in My arch linux install at the moment. It seems the other laptop that i was going to use for the display via Xdmx now shows signs of a dying Hard drive which happens to be of the Parallel Ata Variety which means it's practically impossible to replace cheaply and I'm left with figuring out what of 120 gigs of data I'm saving and where the hell i am going to put it since no moneys coming my way for a while and all the other storage devices are full of data . So i'm stuck for the minute. Guess i am going to have to come up with some solution involving a boot cd that can boot of a usb stick to save the laptop (Plop) comes to mind.

As for the material test suite page, This line desperately needs a image to describe what the hell *dust particles* look like.

While you’re at it, we’d appreciate if you tested dust rendering. When the test suite is complete, leave the station and fly away until you are no longer mass locked. Fly at normal speed and at hyperspeed (default: “J” key). Note whether you see dust particles flying past. Test this in every available shader mode (to change shader mode, pause, press “2” or “F2”, and select “Game Options…”).

I get to that later...

That healthy frame rate Died when i got close to the ships and enabled dust shaders by commenting out the section with it in with /* and */. Not of course That i have any idea what the Dust is supposed to look like (see above) nor do i have anything to compare it too for the same reason *sigh*

cheers and prayers for all your data storage devices

phrashee

This is what the dust-shader type dust looks like under Jump/Torus drive speed....(the white streaks). The particles are visible at normal speeds to just not elongated into streaks.

If they are killing your frame rate then that's suggests that the current drivers for that GPU still process them on the CPU rather than the GPU (which was why they were disabled by default).

The pauses to load textures, and the occasional missing texture - probably lack of texture memory. A very full hard-disk may also be contributing to long read times.

Well, I got curious and tried something...

Instead of using what is supplied by the arch repositories as recommended by the oolite site for arch users, i went ahead and downloaded the build from the web page and the results are again interesting.

results are

1) the warning about Gnustep and multithreading is gone when the oolite is started.
2) There are no more white cobras or nav buoys
3) My savefile may be corrupted because while it loads, the self repair system and wormhole scanner equipment shows up twice in my ship's equipment list though boht pieces of equipment function normally.

thoughts???

cheers
phrashee

I take back what I said about the pacman package manager, I didn't understand that it separates local packages from packages online, guess that what i get for being a former debian user.

cheers

phrashee

Hi phrashee, I had stuff showing up twice in the equipment list and it turned out I had two separate installations of Oolite and the one I was running was reading OXP's from both installations. Hope it helps.

greyth, you were right about the equipment double thing.

I have found that the squiqqles have nothing to do with oolite and something to do with opengl or mesa as i was able to get the same effect in chromium by asking it on the command line to ignore it's gpu blacklist and when i play a video via html5 ( i used youtube for this), they are there as well.

another_commander wrote:

Hi and welcome to the game. To enable full shaders for your family of cards, open with a text editor the file gpu-settings.plist, found inside the folder Resources/Config and change line 78 from

Code: Select all

maximum_shader_level = "SHADERS_SIMPLE";

to

Code: Select all

maximum_shader_level = "SHADERS_FULL";

Save the file, restart Oolite with Shift held down and you should now be able to choose Full Shaders from the game options menu.

I tried to do that, and now the Coriolis station looks completely black in full shading, and white in simple or no shading. It seems like an issue with textures, however I can no longer revert back to the previous settings (I tried unistalling and reinstalling, but with no luck). Any ideas?
GPU is an ATI Radeon Hd 4600 series, btw.

Have you tried a GPU driver update, ioannis? Oh... welcome aboard.

El Viejo wrote:

Have you tried a GPU driver update, ioannis? Oh... welcome aboard.

thank you, I don't think that's the problem, it was working ok before I changed the lines.