Oolite Bulletins

I can finally play Oolite in full shaders! Wooo! Thank you. That is all.

Nice, innit?

Congrats! Suddenly you can enjoy a lot more eye candy

I run Oolite on Windows 7. It must have been the memory fix they put into the Windows client. I had a hard time at first and it took me a few minutes to adjust to the new visuals.

Oh.

I just realised one of my favourite (tiny) features was actually a bug!

Did anyone else get "scoop, scoop, scoop, scoop..." when their scoop was active, only hearing "active" as it switched off?

Now it repeats "scoop active", which is far less amusing

Anyway, thanks to whoever maintains the Arch Linux package, that was pretty darn quick!

Talisker wrote:

Oh.

I just realised one of my favourite (tiny) features was actually a bug!

Did anyone else get "scoop, scoop, scoop, scoop..." when their scoop was active, only hearing "active" as it switched off?

Now it repeats "scoop active", which is far less amusing

Yep.. I used to use that "active" as my signal to turn away from the sun and jump out of the system..

What are the differences between this version and the last? I don't see anything major.

No new features in 1.76.1, just a bunch of bug-fixes (which is good)!

Ok, cool. Bugfixes are good!

Now that I can finally run Oolite with full shaders my computer refuses to run it with no shaders. It seems my computer likes and now insists on shaders because every time I tried to set for no shaders my computer crashed to desktop.

Solonar wrote:

Now that I can finally run Oolite with full shaders my computer refuses to run it with no shaders. It seems my computer likes and now insists on shaders because every time I tried to set for no shaders my computer crashed to desktop.

What's your GPU Solonar (and if some variation of Intel HD your driver revision).

Capt. Murphy wrote:

Solonar wrote:

Now that I can finally run Oolite with full shaders my computer refuses to run it with no shaders. It seems my computer likes and now insists on shaders because every time I tried to set for no shaders my computer crashed to desktop.

What's your GPU Solonar (and if some variation of Intel HD your driver revision).

Windows 7 64 bit

Intel Core [email protected]

Intel HD 2000 Driver Version: 8.15.10.2291

Thanks Solonar.

I used to get the same problem frequently with my core i5 HD3000 which uses the same driver packages as the HD2000. I've just done some tests this morning with a much newer driver revision (8.15.10.2696) and it very rarely crashes on setting shaders to off and then only if I've used the debug console to spawn a lot of extra ships or set the GPU control panel graphics slider to 'Quality' (rather than 'Balanced' or 'Performance').

I also rolled back to the oldest driver I've got available (8.15.10.2372) which is still more recent than yours. With this driver it crashes almost every time I set shaders to off even without spawning extra ships and having the quality at 'Balanced'.

So if it the inability to use shaders off is bothering you.... .....I'd suggest visiting the Intel site and upgrading to the current release driver. You will probably have to follow the instructions to work around OEM restrictions on updating drivers. If you would prefer to use OEM supplied drivers don't bother with anything numbered after .2372 and before .2656 as these all have problems rendering planets and background images.

Even if the inability to set to shaders off isn't bothering you there are a few other things noticeably fixed on the current drivers, including some shader errors, and for what it's worth it will raise your Windows Experience Index a few decipoints. The list of compatible 'commercial' games according to Intel is much longer with the new drivers as-well.

Out of interest how much RAM does your system have, and what was stopping you using shaders with 1.76? Did you notice tearing issues with some models with 1.76?

I have 4.0 gigs of installed ram and 1.6 gigs of graphic memory. Not being able to use the shaders isn't an issue for me as I don't seem to have any problems with having them on. I have run Oolite at full shaders for two days now and have experienced no significant issues or crashes. I have tried updating my graphic driver previously as was suggested by others but it created unusual graphic errors for oolite, both for objects and for the text display, which would come out with a blurred and unreadable appearance. I would always have to rollback to my factory installed graphics driver to correct these issues. I am uncertain of what was preventing me from using shaders in 1.76. It would routinely run for a few minutes and then crash to desktop. I can only assume it is the large memory fix they put in 1.76.1 that corrected this problem as now this problem no longer exists for me.

Solonar wrote:

I am uncertain of what was preventing me from using shaders in 1.76. It would routinely run for a few minutes and then crash to desktop. I can only assume it is the large memory fix they put in 1.76.1 that corrected this problem as now this problem no longer exists for me.

Yep, I had similar problems with 1.76, which eventually led to trying to find out how to compile as LARGE_ADDRESS_AWARE. It is in my opinion a general bug with the Intel HD drivers (as is the propensity to crash on switching to no shaders), but at least we've got a good workaround for the crashes in general play.