Oolite Bulletins

Been playing for a while - thanks for letting me relive my teenage years! Anyway, my HUD problem is that my radar display looks like this. This isn't a problem so long as ships remain yellow, but as soon as they fix their weapons on me, they blend so well into the red background that it takes ages to locate them. When my ID fixes onto a ship, the red vanishes and I can see everything properly, but in the meantime I can easily get half my shields blown away. What's going on?

That's very odd indeed (as is the coriolis picture). Which version of Oolite are you using and do you have the latest drivers for your graphics hardware?

Both look weeeeeird!

Am running the latest version of Oolite, on a Pentium processor with Windows XP. Have just downloaded and installed the latest updates for my SiS 661FX graphics card and it still looks the same.

Very strange indeed. Never seen that in my Windows Oolite...

Sorry, I meant Celeron, not Pentium (in case that makes a difference)

I downloaded the Kleptohud, and while I still get the same weird effect, at least it's in green so the pirates show up against it.

What gfx card?

Forgot to say, with the Kleptohud, my radar normally looks like this. However, as soon as I lock onto anything (ident or missile target), it changes to this. With the normal HUD I get the same effect but in red. Does that shed any light on the problem?

I had problems with Kleptohud several versions ago, admittedly they were less stable, but since removing Kleptohud then have had no problems, so try it with the convential Oolite hud.

BOL

I don't think the special HUDs have anything to do with it. After all, they are just pieces of graphics stuck on the screen...

How much vid memory does the graphics card have? I'm not familiar with that make or model myself...

I think Wolf is right, 'cos I have the same problem with a normal HUD, just in red.

Having rechecked, I don't think I have a dedicated graphics card, just the SiS 661 FX motherboard and a 256 MB PC2700 DDR memory. But, since the display sorts itself out whenever I lock onto something, how can it be a hardware isue?

UPDATE - I've just discovered that the display only sorts itself out when I lock onto something with a scanner targeting enhancement fitted. Without the STE, it stays weird whether or not I'm locked onto anything.

One more thing - when I go jump, the radar will sometimes go "normal" for a moment before reverting to its normal weird self.

lolwhites wrote:

But, since the display sorts itself out whenever I lock onto something, how can it be a hardware isue?

Buggy hardware and/or drivers that don't implement the OpenGL standard correctly. Since the graphics display correctly on other vendors cards on many architectures (known to work well with nvidia/ati cards on Apple machines, nvidia/ati/intel on Linux x86, whatever SGI put in the Indigo, FreeBSD with nvidia and at least nvidia and ati on Windows), I'd say there is a big finger pointing at hardware and/or driver bugs in whatever chipset you have just by process of elimination.

Interestingly, I've just installed Linux Ubuntu and installed Oolite Linux onto the same machine (dual boot, no new hardware) and the HUD displays properly, though I still have the same problem as before with XP. Does that shed any more light on things?

With the enhanced targeting system, you get text along with the lock. I'll bet the graphics card is having a problem rendering text in accelerated mode. The easiest debugging step is to configure your DirectX/graphics settings and reducing the amount of hardware acceleration to use; often this will correct the problem immediately.

Linux uses other drivers, of course. Often they don't use any hardware acceleration at all; when they do, it tends to be slower but more stable.