Oolite Bulletins

Recently I've played on a friends win7 system - a Samsung laptop with and Intel graphics chipset...

Periodically Win7 reported that Oolite had stopped working and closed the task down. (As always that happens just after I've won a joust or something else to be proud of..)

He also owns a desktop with a Win7 Oolite installation 1.76 running on a dual core with integrated Radeon - he says it does the same thing.

There have also some been some objects that become invisible and visible again. There were a few ZOrder(?) transparency issues (with shaders running) and some parts of stations, the hunting lodge and so forth would sometimes be transparent to varying degrees or flashing on and off.

An odd thing is that the two machines have different graphic chipsets but display exactly the same kind of thing.

however

On my home system 1.76 is extremely robust (Ubuntu on Dell i800 laptop with a Radeon 9000) I do just sometimes have a system freeze. On reboot the graphics card is reported to have failed 'ring test' and the machine needs to be cold started to recover from metaphysical dichotomy. I've not experienced that with others program - but all the other stuff I use amounts to nothing much. All that asides Oolite runs well and reliably for hours. Very robust. (I don't have shaders)

So,

Is there anything specific (the machines are running up do date drivers) that might cause such issues? If not we've agreed to try same hardware linuxant loaded with 1.76 to establish hard or soft error. Interesting if reliability does improve on his system, I have my suspicions!

Quite asides from that... I saw 1.76 with BGS oxp loaded... lol... that's excellent, thanks. It's Alive!

Sounds like those machines have got the current Intel HD 3000 chipset - see https://bb.oolite.space/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=11455 for my problems finding a reasonably stable driver to run Oolite with this GPU, and the source code change Ahruman made to cure the Z-buffering issues.

I don't think this change has been applied to the current download of 1.76, but it is in the current nightly builds.

Trying different drivers and tweaking the quality settings on the drivers control panel applet I found big differences in memory usage and stability between drivers and settings, with high memory usage and poor stability going hand-in-hand. Better stability could often be maintained by rebooting the machine prior to an Oolite session. Having said all that I'm happy that I've got it working to my satisfaction now.

My old XP machine with a Radeon card used to freeze with full shaders on, but was fine on simple shaders.

Thanks Capt. Murphy. I read the thread but could not absorb. I'll try again tomorrow.

I dug on old PC out (500w PSU so I haven't used it in a while - costs about a shilling on the hour). XP SP3 with an Nvidia 6200. It turns out that it sports full shaders which were breathtaking on a 37" monitor. There was no sign of any ZOrder error whatsoever and Oolite was rock solid despite me adding the Furball OXP, Deep Space Pirates, Switeck Shipping to create extra load. Even on a 2gig Socket A machine the software performed impeccably.

The missus wasn't too happy about me commandeering the TV but I won her over with the promise that we could watch 'Netflix' or similar!

Finally got around to tackling the laptop with the Intel HD graphics. Uninstalled and cleaned, re-downed Oolite and the OXP's - still the same, regularly crashing under Win7 64bit. Loaded Linuxant partition with Ubuntu 11.10 32bit and installed Oolite. 30% faster framerate reported but visually there is some jerkiness apparent (I've read that this may be fixed by loading previous version of Ubuntu. So far it appears to have stabilised! Win7.... hmm

Greyth wrote:

Finally got around to tackling the laptop with the Intel HD graphics. Uninstalled and cleaned, re-downed Oolite and the OXP's - still the same, regularly crashing under Win7 64bit. Loaded Linuxant partition with Ubuntu 11.10 32bit and installed Oolite. 30% faster framerate reported but visually there is some jerkiness apparent (I've read that this may be fixed by loading previous version of Ubuntu. So far it appears to have stabilised! Win7.... hmm

I blame the Intel gfx drivers. Have you tried a different version? Sometimes it can happen that older driver versions behave better than the latest ones.

With the Linuxant jerkiness yeah, it seems to be a rendering/timing issue but I'm not sure that Win7 instability is down to the gfx driver as I've tried two. The newer one corrected some ZOrder oddities and improved framerate but did nothing to improve stability. So far Linux wins on that machine (Samsung R540) hands down.

[edit] I more strongly suspect the win7 architecture. One time I saw it throw an error box saying 'Oolite has stopped working' but Oolite was in fact working perfectly in the background and only stopped when I clicked 'o.k.' on the error box [/edit]

Installed to C:\oolite. It's good to know someone has it working acceptably on Win7-64 - so it can be done!

I think you will find quite a few here that have Oolite working just fine under Win 7 64 bit, me being one of them.
I have Oolite 1.76 and 1.77 trunk working just fine on Win 7 64bit and 32bit. I do have nVIDIA graphics cards on my machines though (with the exception of one very old P4 32 bit machine which has an old Radeon card). Anyway, they are all running fine.

I think its the new Intel core i5 and i3 integrated CPU/GPU chipsets and their drivers that are fault. Unfortunately they appear to be ubiquitous in the UK moderately priced laptop selection. Having said that I've got my Win7 laptop up and running Oolite to my satisfaction after a long driver search.

I built a machine recently for a friend, I5 2500K on an ASUS micro-ATX motherboard. Installed Win7 with all the updates and the motherboard support, before installing the graphics card I installed trunk 4800 and gave it a run with no problems, using the inbuilt HD3000. I did this to check on performance the log reported opengl version 3.2 - full shaders and a frame rate of about 70 fps, with a 23" screen running 1680x1080. This was obviously a clean system, but it worked quite well.
My laptop, a DELL inspiron with a i3, runs trunk as well but the drivers only provide opengl 2.1.
No idea whether this helps, it does however seem as though it is a driver situation.

Ironfist

So, it should work! Hmm, out of interest I loaded Ubuntu on my desktop to see if I got an improved framerate. The answer was a resounding no, XP won hands down. I also managed to wipe out several gig of data that I'd rather have kept [inane laugh]. Luckily, somewhere, I burned it to CD - although I think Linux has put it in a folder called lost+found!. As soon as I can find a way to access it I'll be in the know. I like Linux, imagine M$ putting data into directories during a partitioning exercise. I like Linux.

Greyth wrote:

So, it should work! Hmm, out of interest I loaded Ubuntu on my desktop to see if I got an improved framerate. The answer was a resounding no, XP won hands down. I also managed to wipe out several gig of data that I'd rather have kept [inane laugh].

It shouldn't have done. Done right, you should have got a dual-boot machine that prompts you for Ubuntu or XP on startup, with your XP partition intact as it was.

Greyth wrote:

Luckily, somewhere, I burned it to CD - although I think Linux has put it in a folder called lost+found!.

I wouldn't have thought so.

Greyth wrote:

As soon as I can find a way to access it I'll be in the know. I like Linux, imagine M$ putting data into directories during a partitioning exercise. I like Linux.

Did you over-write your XP installation?

Yes yes dual boot, plum coloured menu and all. That much I seemed to have done correctly. 3.3 gig was in the lost+found which is the amount of data that I wiped. Not that it matters as I have disks, good thing - I managed to completely Bjork that load by purging the video driver and then expecting the machine to reboot. No, no I overwrote a slaved disk. I'm still not sure precisely how as Linux was confined to a 30gb partition as specified but the entire disk went to Ext4. I've since found others who have experienced similar loss of data but have recovered it from lost+found... just goes to show...