Oolite Bulletins

Simon B wrote:

It is now possible to run a fairly full neolite universe.

i have over 100 ships in my game, original vintage versions, neolite versions, griffs versions, sungs versions, and my own versions of the standard ships, plus all the other expacs.

With simple shaders, most of the ship look boring after a while (no colooors ), but the Fer-de-Lance is completely black on my system. Is that intentional? It's a bit hard to shoot it to pieces when I have to estimate its position with the targeting scanner extension.

Corny wrote:

With simple shaders, most of the ship look boring after a while (no colooors ), but the Fer-de-Lance is completely black on my system. Is that intentional? It's a bit hard to shoot it to pieces when I have to estimate its position with the targeting scanner extension.

Sounds like a bug in your graphics drivers...had that myself when I had to use ATI drivers a year ago.

Screet

One single ship black because of the graphics drivers?
Anyway, using a mac, I didn't fiddle with the drivers... and I won't. If this problem stays a single case, it's no problem
Oh woops, Intel GMA 950, by the way. Forgot to include that in the last post.

Corny wrote:

One single ship black because of the graphics drivers?

Yes, that's possible.

Corny wrote:

Anyway, using a mac, I didn't fiddle with the drivers... and I won't. If this problem stays a single case, it's no problem
Oh woops, Intel GMA 950, by the way. Forgot to include that in the last post.

Maybe you should look for an updated version of the drivers if you haven't ever updated them!

I've still got a problem with the newer drivers for my old ATI card - but it's much better now. Only two of over a hundred models in black...and it's none of the griff ships.

Screet

Screet wrote:

Maybe you should look for an updated version of the drivers if you haven't ever updated them!

As far as I know, driver updates come with the system updates at Mac OS X. So if there'd be updates, I would've applied them already.
Just wondering if there are others on mac with the gma 950 who have the same problem.

Corny wrote:

With simple shaders, most of the ship look boring after a while (no colooors :( ), but the Fer-de-Lance is completely black on my system. Is that intentional? It's a bit hard to shoot it to pieces when I have to estimate its position with the targeting scanner extension.

Totally black with no surface details usually means that one of the maps did not load - check the logs for errors and make sure that the textures are present.

FDL does not use any different shaders to the others.

I am bugfixing neolite core - please present observations and suggestions to the fancy classics thread.

Simon B wrote:

I am bugfixing neolite core - please present observations and suggestions to the fancy classics thread.

One of us has misunderstood the other. I was referring to griff-pack, not neolite. Were you referring to my post?
If not, misunderstanding from my side

Corny wrote:

Simon B wrote:

I am bugfixing neolite core - please present observations and suggestions to the fancy classics thread.

One of us has misunderstood the other. I was referring to griff-pack, not neolite. Were you referring to my post?
If not, misunderstanding from my side :D

Sorry - seems the last thing you talked about was a neolite add-on. Thus - context mix up.

The comment about all-black being a symptom of a texture not loading still holds. Request that suggestions concerning neolite go in the neolite thread (which you have done - thank you) also still holds - though not as relevant :)

What changes is that griff is, indeed, using different shaders for each ship so it is entirely possible that a driver issue can create a funny effect limited to only one.

Not all shaders are enabled in i950 - some effects will be missing even on minimum. But if it is still black on zero shaders then it is most likely a misloaded texture (I don't think griff is using a different diffuse map for the event that shaders are off). Still check the logs.

yep, the fer-de-lance is using a shader effect not used on the other ships - it uses an extra normal ('bump') map that is scaled really small and tiled over the surface of the ship and used to drive a 'microfleck' 2 tone paint map over some part of the hull of the ship - it must be confusing some graphics drivers and causing the ships to not render correctly, to be honest the griff fer-de-lance needs a whole re-do, it's difficult to stay faithfull to the original silhouette and still have neat lighting, if i could work out how to paint lovely plastic looking materials and shaders i would totally make them look like the new bike designs from the tron 2.0 movie, they just look perfect for what is an expensive ship especially that black/white i-pod one - or the honda 'icare' bikes

Griff wrote:

yep, the fer-de-lance is using a shader effect not used on the other ships - it uses an extra normal ('bump') map that is scaled really small and tiled over the surface of the ship and used to drive a 'microfleck' 2 tone paint map over some part of the hull of the ship - it must be confusing some graphics drivers and causing the ships to not render correctly, to be honest the griff fer-de-lance needs a whole re-do, it's difficult to stay faithfull to the original silhouette and still have neat lighting, if i could work out how to paint lovely plastic looking materials and shaders i would totally make them look like the new bike designs from the tron 2.0 movie, they just look perfect for what is an expensive ship especially that black/white i-pod one - or the honda 'icare' bikes

By accident i made a plastic-ish effect while making a shader version of the Eagle2:

Is that the sort of effect you were looking for? Pretty simple to do, just use a a single color for the background, have the effects map set up to make it extremly shiny, and have it set to smooth. The higher the poly count on curves the better.

ADCK wrote:

By accident i made a plastic-ish effect while making a shader version of the Eagle2

That looks pretty nice. Wish I could have it, but shaders don't work on my pc!

Griff wrote:

*fishes for new shader effects* C'mon Ahruman, shader it up a bit! :D

I rather like the idea of having one ship somewhere that actually uses the standard material model instead of something custom. ;-)

Corny wrote:

With simple shaders, most of the ship look boring after a while (no colooors :( ), but the Fer-de-Lance is completely black on my system. Is that intentional? It's a bit hard to shoot it to pieces when I have to estimate its position with the targeting scanner extension.

The GMA 950 is a very limited GPU. I’m not surprised if most of Griff’s shaders are too complex for it even in simple mode. The only way around this, other than disabling shaders, is to test and optimize the simple-mode shaders on a GMA 950. (You’ll be happy to hear that I do this for the built-in shaders.)

Ahruman wrote:

Corny wrote:

With simple shaders, most of the ship look boring after a while (no colooors ), but the Fer-de-Lance is completely black on my system. Is that intentional? It's a bit hard to shoot it to pieces when I have to estimate its position with the targeting scanner extension.

The GMA 950 is a very limited GPU. I’m not surprised if most of Griff’s shaders are too complex for it even in simple mode. The only way around this, other than disabling shaders, is to test and optimize the simple-mode shaders on a GMA 950. (You’ll be happy to hear that I do this for the built-in shaders.)

Yay!
The problem does not appear on my system with the 1.74-trunk. I don't know what you changed, but it seems to work