Corrupt Texture problem

[Frame]

I'm currently using the 180.48 drivers and also tried 177.79

Heat might be a problem, I'll try with the case open - though I can run MS Flight Sim X without problem and that does stress the CPU and GPU

Turning off Aero sounds interesring, I'll give it a try

Aero is switched off automatically here when I run certain programs (for example together with oolite)...and heat's no problem. My system ain't even busy, I can do pretty much, there's only the memory demand of the game...and the bug drops in right when launching the game.

Maybe Vista is behaving slightly differently than XP concerning texture stuff, IF the problem is not visible under XP. I haven't tried yet with my development machine...

Furthermore, having the case open does not always help to reduce heat. Some Macs even slow down instantly because the airflow gets corrupted and thus the machine gets hotter when their case is open...

From the code side, I'd expect it to be something with the initial loading of the texture being buggy under Vista. Maybe some variable that is not properly initialized, most often read correctly, leading to correct initialization, but sometimes it's not.

Screet

your problems sound exactly like mine, i fixed them...

here is the problem shown before the fix



Here it is the fixed



My graphics card is an ATI HD 2600 XT AGP from

HIS - Hightech Information System Limited

I quote my solution from another thread...

succes!!!! for now.....

unless i report otherwise... the culprit seems to be the driver...

I was using the driver designated Vista_8.501-080602a-064989E-ATI downloaded from

HIS - Hightech Information System Limited

Now i´m using the one designated...

Vista_8.43-071016a-054099E-ATI

now, i´m not sure about your cards vendor, but you might solve your problem by using an older driver... All i had to do was to step one driver version to get it working...

[Screet]

your problems sound exactly like mine, i fixed them...
My graphics card is an ATI HD 2600 XT AGP from
unless i report otherwise... the culprit seems to be the driver...

Now i´m using the one designated...

Vista_8.43-071016a-054099E-ATI

now, i´m not sure about your cards vendor, but you might solve your problem by using an older driver... All i had to do was to step one driver version to get it working...

It's an Asus one, used with the ATI driver 8.12 and before that 8.11 - I had the same results as you before and after the fix on both versions.

The interestint part is, that sometimes I get the nebulae as it should be, and sometimes not. Until now, I've been unable to figure out why it does work sometimes and sometimes not.

Same applies for the texture problem: It's not always there, and it jumps from ship to ship between launches of oolite. For example, the Dredger Trader or CM3 gets garbled on some textures...stop the program, launch it again, and the texture is working properly...and sometimes just moves on to a different ship.

The point that astonishes me is, that you could fix it with your driver using an OLDER version, especially since the person starting the thread here reported using an nvidia product, not ATI.

Screet

[DGill]

Tried everything without luck.

The GPU fan is under auto contol giving 60C at 35% fan speed

Also tried an ad-on opx to see if the textures worked better than default but I doubt the author intended this effect:


[img][img]http://i552.photobucket.com/albums/jj33 ... riolis.jpg[/img][/img]

[Frame]

your problems sound exactly like mine, i fixed them...
My graphics card is an ATI HD 2600 XT AGP from
unless i report otherwise... the culprit seems to be the driver...

Now i´m using the one designated...

Vista_8.43-071016a-054099E-ATI

now, i´m not sure about your cards vendor, but you might solve your problem by using an older driver... All i had to do was to step one driver version to get it working...

It's an Asus one, used with the ATI driver 8.12 and before that 8.11 - I had the same results as you before and after the fix on both versions.

The interestint part is, that sometimes I get the nebulae as it should be, and sometimes not. Until now, I've been unable to figure out why it does work sometimes and sometimes not.

Same applies for the texture problem: It's not always there, and it jumps from ship to ship between launches of oolite. For example, the Dredger Trader or CM3 gets garbled on some textures...stop the program, launch it again, and the texture is working properly...and sometimes just moves on to a different ship.

The point that astonishes me is, that you could fix it with your driver using an OLDER version, especially since the person starting the thread here reported using an nvidia product, not ATI.

Screet

My problems with nebulas was that sometimes they worked, most of the time they did not...

i was responding to your problems with nebulas... I suggest that you try and use Asus drivers, older ones if you can without any other unwanted side effects...

regarding DGill´s problems... DGill try holding shift down while starting Oolite to flush and rebuild the cache... I Totally forgot about that it could be that the cache have a problem.

I hope that works... since the temperature seems fine .

Cheers Frame...

[DGill]

I think I've solved it.

It's getting late so I'll test some more tomorrow. But thanks to all for the tips and suggestions. Oolite and the Oolite community are superb.

I have a quad processor so I set in bios only 1 core (actually when I ran Vista I noticed two of the four cores were operating?)

I ran Oolite and all was fine - lovely textures - fantastic job who ever did the conversion from Elite.

I don't suppose anyone knows a way to drop out cores from Windows rather having to mess with the bios?

Anyway big decision - go to bed or try out all those available OXP's ...

[Screet]

My problems with nebulas was that sometimes they worked, most of the time they did not...

i was responding to your problems with nebulas... I suggest that you try and use Asus drivers, older ones if you can without any other unwanted side effects...

regarding DGill´s problems... DGill try holding shift down while starting Oolite to flush and rebuild the cache... I Totally forgot about that it could be that the cache have a problem.

I hope that works... since the temperature seems fine .

Cheers Frame...

Hmmm...seems I really should do the easy test: bring oolite to my development machine, which has much older drivers and see what I get.

However, DGill's problem looks exactly as what I see fromt texture corruption. Most often it's not all of a ship that gets corrupted, and the problem is from the first loading of the game. If I restart the game, the "buggy part" is virtually juggled around to some other ship. That's why I thought that the nebulae and the texture problem come hand in hand.

Screet

[JensAyton]

I have a quad processor so I set in bios only 1 core (actually when I ran Vista I noticed two of the four cores were operating?)

That’s somewhat odd. Oolite does adapt the number of texture-loading threads to the number of logical processors available (as listed in the beginning of the log), but I have never once seen texture corruption on my dual-core system under Mac OS X, Linux or Windows.

[Screet]

I think I've solved it.

It's getting late so I'll test some more tomorrow. But thanks to all for the tips and suggestions. Oolite and the Oolite community are superb.

I have a quad processor so I set in bios only 1 core (actually when I ran Vista I noticed two of the four cores were operating?)

I ran Oolite and all was fine - lovely textures - fantastic job who ever did the conversion from Elite.

I don't suppose anyone knows a way to drop out cores from Windows rather having to mess with the bios?

Anyway big decision - go to bed or try out all those available OXP's ...

Seems you did write that at the same time I was writing...thus I missed this post. Obviously, our systems have the Quadcore in common, oolite even writes that it detected it properly...however Ahruman wrote, it doesn't come up on his dual core.

Let me guess: Ahruman, you use an intel processor and DGill, you use an AMD Phenom like I do?

Screet, now booting up that development machine with single core AMD

[Screet]

I think I've solved it.

It's getting late so I'll test some more tomorrow. But thanks to all for the tips and suggestions. Oolite and the Oolite community are superb.

I have a quad processor so I set in bios only 1 core (actually when I ran Vista I noticed two of the four cores were operating?)

GRATS!!! I guess noone expected that multicore processor usage was the cause of the texture problems!

I just installed oolite with all oxp's I use on my singlecore development machine, however using it's XP X64 (don't have Vista on that machine). Had to install quite many updates...and no more texture problems!

I even updated the 14 month old graphics driver to the newest one from ATI...and still no corruption!

I even was astonished how many models of crafts I did not encounter yet, even though I am close to 7000 kills now

Only sad thing was that oolite apparently ran out of memory in the moment it was about to show me the GriffBoa

Therefore, it's NOT the driver. Either Vista mixes in somewhere or, as DGill most probably correctly suggested, it's a multicore processor problem! IIRC the problem wasn't there in the release version, has anything changed since then which might cause that problem?

Any ideas upon how to prevent the problem arising on my Phenom Quadcore machine without losing performance for other stuff?

Screet

[another_commander]

I don't suppose anyone knows a way to drop out cores from Windows rather having to mess with the bios?

I suggest you google setting up processor affinity for applications in Vista.

[DGill]

Thanks another_commander, I found how to do it - now runnng my quad on two cores only for Oolite and all is working fine.

Changed last line of RunOolite.bat to:

@echo off
set GNUSTEP_PATH_HANDLING=windows
set GNUSTEP_LOCAL_ROOT=e:\Oolite\oolite.app
set GNUSTEP_NETWORK_ROOT=e:\Oolite\oolite.app
set GNUSTEP_SYSTEM_ROOT=e:\Oolite\oolite.app
set HOMEPATH=e:\Oolite\oolite.app
start /affinity 02 oolite.app\oolite.exe %1 %2 %3 %4


[img][img]http://i552.photobucket.com/albums/jj33 ... riolis.jpg[/img][/img]

[Screet]

Thanks another_commander, I found how to do it - now runnng my quad on two cores only for Oolite and all is working fine.

start /affinity 02 oolite.app\oolite.exe %1 %2 %3 %4

This does start the game using only ONE processor, using the second one. I've got 100% CPU load during flight on it, but the game runs pretty fine. If you add /min to that command line, the window for the batch starts minimized, as additional optimization.

Even the typically garbled grass snake and L-Crate transport had proper textures! Watching the models at start-up I was even unable to find a single garbled texture at all until the game went down after showing me too many models.

Things are MUCH better with this, however, I had still one little garbled texture within a docking slit of a station (almost not noticeable) and on a shipyard, as well as boxed nebulae...seems this does reduce the likelihood of garbled things appearing almost completely. During gameplay I had loss-of-texture problem for a few ships, though. Probably that has to be addressed to low-memory? I am a bit unable to understand why Vista, using >1GB for cache, can run low on memory...but that's surely some Vista thing.

Could it be that, given proper circumstances, the textures are being used before the texture-loading process is finished and that this is almost impossible when running on one core only?

Anyway, I'll leave it running on one core, things look sooooo much better now!

Screet, very happy

[DGill]

Screet - I've had over an hours game-play without problems so perhaps your out-of-memory issue is because you have more add-ons than I have.

[another_commander]

Screet's out of memory issue is a memory leak known to us for a while now. I think it is the only remaining serious memory leak in the game. Staying on the ship parade screen without pressing space causes Oolite to consume memory every time a new ship is generated for demonstration. If you have many OXP ships (and with RS you can't really fail on ship quantities), there is a good chance your memory will run out before the demo is complete.

We hope to be able to resolve this annoyance soon.

[DGill]

but I have never once seen texture corruption on my dual-core system under Mac OS X, Linux or Windows.

Just tried Oolite on Intel E6750 dual core PC at work and it runs fine so texture corruption seems to be a Quad-core issue