Oolite Bulletins

I just installed the latest ATI 10.1 driver and took my ship out for a long test flight.

It seems to run Oolite a little better... everything looks really good.
Except for Griff's ship set... the same problem as before.

See thumbnails for comparison:

Driver 9.10



Driver 10.1




It's very irksome... better performance but no Griff shaders.
WAAAAHHHH!!

I'm sorry, i have no idea at all why the shaders don't work properly for you - from looking at your screen shot it looks like the normal map texture is loading OK (including it's alpha channel which is providing the cockpit glow), but the diffuse texture has gone missing except for maybe it's alpha channel which is providing some specular mapping - i'm just guessing at this because it looks like we can see some 'paint scratches' along the edges on some of the plates at the back of the ship - i can only think that this is coming from the spec map.
The effects map on the main hull is not working but it is on the gun subentity since we can see it glowing hot - i assume you've just done some shooting or is it glowing like that all the time - because it shouldn't be!

There's a few things i need to go back and do with these shaders, some small tweaks where i could get away with using a 'vec2' or a 'float' to store some values whereas i've currently got a vec4 doing the job, i don't think this is going to help much here though, it didn't fix Frames similar problem with my anaconda oxp, see here: https://bb.oolite.space/viewtopic.php?t=7465

Thanks for the reply Griff... and yes I had just been shooting, in order to show what was working and what wasn't.
It's not your fault... it's bloody ATI.

The thing that puzzles me is why the older drivers (9.6 to 9.10) work fine, but the newer drivers (9.11 to 10.1) don't.
I've still had no reply to my e-mail to ATI.

I'll stick with the lower, prettier performance. Your ships are just too good to give up.


Regards

Have just tested ATI CCC 10.2...
again, improved performance but the same problem with shaders.
Back to 9.10... hey-ho.

I had been having the same problem without realising it. I thought the shiny ships were normal. Now I have downloaded 9.10 drivers the ships are a lot better. I have an ATI Radeon 4870x2 running on Vista 64 bit.

At least you guys can roll back to 9.10. In my laptop, I have an ATI Mobility X2300 chip, which means I'm stuck with using legacy drivers. I'm currently using modded 9.11_legacy_vista32 drivers. I tried rolling back to a modded 9.8_legacy_vista32 driver (the only pre-9.11 legacy drivers I can find) which fails to work at all. Modding the 9.10_vista32 drivers just leads to a BSOD on booting.

I've had no luck finding 9.10_legacy_vista32 drivers at all. If anyone out there knows where such a mythical beast might be located, please let me know!

In the meantime, I guess I can live with shiny Griff-ships and tiny square stars.. at least the nebulae aren't weird-looking blobs any more!

You have probably seen this site... but you never know. It looks like the best available. I know zilch about laptops, I'm afraid.

http://www.dl4all.com/software/105688-a ... t-910.html

No, I didn't find that site when I was looking.. thanks! I'll try it out and see how it goes.

Possibly a useful link for anyone having these problems:

http://support.amd.com/us/gpudownload/Pages/index.aspx

Once the appropriate driver page is displayed, find the link to ‘previous drivers’ and there you can select Catalyst version 9.8, 9.9 or 9.10. Follow the installation instructions carefully (there is a link on the page). You will need to uninstall the previous CCC completely, using the add/remove programs tool in Windows.

El Viejo wrote:

You have probably seen this site... but you never know. It looks like the best available. I know zilch about laptops, I'm afraid.

http://www.dl4all.com/software/105688-a ... t-910.html

Update: the driver will not install. It claims to be modded by the same technique I gave in my tutorial, but there are additional files there I've never seen before, and they fail to load.

I've tried with 9.8 and 9.10 again, but with no success, so I've reverted to 9.11 again. I hope the guy who does the Omega Drivers produces a Vista version soon.. I think I'll wait on those.

just mailed Griff about this, i think i'm getting the same bother. got a new quadcore AMD w/ a Radeon 4670 gig card. looks ok but in Rendermonkey the shiny aspect of shaders is blown out ~ the shiny gunmetal armour on my Venoms appears white
he just pointed me at this thread so i'll check what's up w/ my drivers when i get home. dunno what oolite looks like cos i've just had time to stick RM on but i'm assuming since it's using that shader it's gonna have the same probs.

KW, there is a possible issue with the Radeon 4670 and CCC 9.10 drivers that 'dmipet' had.
He rolled back to 9.8 from the disc supplied with his card and has cured his problem.

See this thread:

https://bb.oolite.space/viewtopic.php?p=103042#103042

Cheers bud. bit confused by you all talking about 9.x drivers but his systems showed it as version 8.671
just had a look at my disk (not got the other machine on at the mo) and it says
"DriverVer=07/14/2009, 8.640.0.0000
CatalogFile=CX_85514.CAT"
in the CX_85514.inf (huh?) file so i'm thinking i'm even further outta date.
i've snagged the 9.8 drivers from that site, i'll give them a go.
hate ar$ing about puttings stuff on and off repeatedly tho :-/

Sorry if it's a bit confusing KW.

I tend to use the Catalyst Control Center (Catalyst Software suite) version number rather than the actual driver number (only three numbers to remember). The driver version 8.671.xxx is probably from 9.11 or 9.12. The driver number in CCC 9.10 is 8.661.xxx so you're only a little bit behind.

Let me know if the CCC 9.8 works for you. It should be fine.

edit: If you only install the actual GPU driver from ATI and not the Catalyst Control Center (which includes the driver), you lose some functionality. The CCC enables you to tweak various 3D settings, which I have found to be very useful in Oolite. It also has the ability to overclock your GPU safely. However, that does not seem to improve Oolite at all.

This is why I refer to CCC version numbers, not ‘driver’ numbers.

cheers bud. i've had very little time to explore the damn thing so i know nowt about the functionality of the CCC etc. been having other "issues" that teche support are helping me w/ ~ did a bios update and now getting a CMOS checksum prob
computers - all fun, aren't they?! :-/