Oolite Bulletins

Howdy, been away for a while. me and the future mis has moved from our small flat to a Gosh, bigger flat . however this one is "in Center of the city" and has a nice Antique look to it... very nice...

But in the mean Time, my Windows-XP suffered a Catastrophic Blue Screen of death, in the midst of updating while it was shutting down...

No fancy system restore could help me there since it would restart everytime it reached the windows Boot screen, in effect i wasnt even allowed to enter the windows to do anything.. Repairing from CD didnt work either since the CD had no replacement files for Updated files...

Anyway... i Installed Vista, But now OpenGL does not work, in effect that means That Oolite Does not work...

I have The ATI radeon x800 GFX card installed, and tried all Catalyst Drivers from 7.1 to 7.8...

Oddly enough all DX applications work though... giving me a Exp index Score of 4.9 for the GFX card. This is a Vista Benchmark thing...

Flip 3d and Aero also works nice Aero giving me 5.9 Exp Index...

I was wondering if anyone has experienced similar OpenGL problems... Since as i understood it... Vista now Natively supports OpenGL

I have a Ticket Pending "Work in progress" at ATI, after i responded to their Auto response mail, that told me to run a check list.

The windows Default Driver for the X800 works, however.. very very poorly for both OpenGL and DirectX applications...

So i have Catalyst 7.8 Drivers installed... At least im able to use DX based applications...

Funny enough.. being ironic here... I was writing an OpenGL Oolite Dat File model Viewer for Windows... So its kind of Annoying that OpenGL does not work on my Vista...

The model Viewer is in a Working State... it reads "simple" dat files and Png files and lets you View a single model.... No support for ship.plist yet... allthough i plan for it...

I also intend to keep it as much as Cross-platform as possible so that Mac Users can benefit from it, if someone was up to the task and Converting it for Mac...

Which is why im writing it in OpenGL, and is why im keen in getting OpenGL to work on Vista With the Catalyst Drivers...

Oolite 1.68 gives me a mere 25 FPS at best when nothing is in the view, slowing to a crawling 4 fps when planet or a model is in view, That is without the ATI catalyst driver... With the Catalyst Drivers... Oolite will not start up at all... This goes for All OpenGL programs... Even to most simpelst of programs written in OpenGl will not start up... So It is not Oolite it is the ATI drivers...

I was just hoping that someone here has some sort of solution to the problem... but i am not betting on it... Hey we all grap hay straws at times dont we

Frame wrote:

Funny enough.. being ironic here... I was writing an OpenGL Oolite Dat File model Viewer for Windows... So its kind of Annoying that OpenGL does not work on my Vista...

The model Viewer is in a Working State... it reads "simple" dat files and Png files and lets you View a single model.... No support for ship.plist yet... allthough i plan for it...

I also intend to keep it as much as Cross-platform as possible so that Mac Users can benefit from it, if someone was up to the task and Converting it for Mac...

You might benefit from looking at Dry Dock. It’s in Objective-C, but core things like DAT and OBJ parsing are in C (using yacc-based parsers, as I recall).

Ahruman wrote:

You might benefit from looking at Dry Dock. It’s in Objective-C, but core things like DAT and OBJ parsing are in C (using yacc-based parsers, as I recall).

Thanks, I´ll take a look.. and see if i can use... i just have an itch about using other peoples code that are not confirmed bug-free... for example..

My current PNG file reader Flips Drawed Letters, so that they are backwards.

This has todo offcourse with OpenGLs notation of rendering from bottom left, which requires Image files to be Flipped. in order for the texture to be projected right...

The PNG code is not mine. It is yspng... The example within yspng projects ok, just not on the models i Render in my Model View program... Which means either the PNG code is buggy, or my read of the DAT file is buggy.. which i suspect it is... as i took the values from the DAT files directly and did not manipulate them... A requirement as far is a can think, for textures to render right in OpenGL... i Did not catch the error because all the models i have viewed so far are symmetric.. SO when the model came up all nice.. i thought i had it...

All this trouble, because someone, forgot to think that images are usually saved and drawn from top left as in a paint program, and not bottom left as in a mathematical coordinate system :-/...

I will switch the texture coordinates in a mather that should solve this, however i prioritise solving my current GFX problem.. which means hacking, slizing, Windows and ATI until i find a solution.. I usually do, within a month...

On the GFX driver problem side of things... ATI custom Care has confirmed my bug, and i had to submit another report, this time to the Catalyst Crew, and they would take my "findings" into consideration... Since this bug may only be related directly to my Brand of GFX card, namely the Saphire X800 XT Platinum Edition...

I mean, i cant even run the simpelst of simplest of OpenGL programs... where as the Windows Default Driver does this with no trouble... however. with very poor performance...


EDIT: Nice... i just lost the basic functionality i had with OpenGL, as know, windows Vista Refuses to install its own driver again... It identifies it ok, but cant install...

Guees i have to go update, as The DVD does not have the driver in a form that i can grab,..

Wonderfull, Everything i expected from Microsoft... Windows 95, Version 7.0 aka Vista

Frame wrote:

Thanks, I´ll take a look.. and see if i can use... i just have an itch about using other peoples code that are not confirmed bug-free...

Wheras you, of course, always write bug-free code. ;-)

Frame wrote:

My current PNG file reader Flips Drawed Letters, so that they are backwards.

I suspect this is actually a question of co-ordinate systems. Oolite uses a left-handed co-ordinate system; it is necessary to flip the X co-ordinate of DAT files to render with OpenGL the obvious way, or to convert to/from most other formats. (For instance, Obj2DatTex.py, line 89, does this.)

Ahruman wrote:

Frame wrote:

Thanks, I´ll take a look.. and see if i can use... i just have an itch about using other peoples code that are not confirmed bug-free...

Wheras you, of course, always write bug-free code.

hehe ofcourse i do ... no, its just you are quite lost when you do hit a snag since you are not familiar with the code....

Regarding Flipping.. what i thought...

found out it is the png code, you can achive the same result by flipping any image in an image editor...

The Png reader manually Flips all the image data...

ill will have to rewrite that..

Edit: The above was wrong .. :S... Simply Flipped the X, And changed Cull to Back. So Oolite models are backwards too... Wonderfull... lol

So everything is in working order now, thank you Ahruman for you insightfull help

The gfx issue persist, have minimal OpenGL funtionality with Catalyst drivers 7.1 for vista. i suspect that is because these are lacking the ICD from ATI, so the drivers im using is the Windows Default layerd upon DirectX 10, with a huge performance hit.

One question. Didn't you bother to start WinXP in safe mode and attempt to roll back the update that knacked the PC, or find out why it was crashing at startup? Vista for all the eye candy may appear to be wonderful, but it has it's drawbacks it's infancy for starters and of course the inablilty to play Oolite! I've just gone through a major re-build session with WinXP because I had a knackered hard drive which I inadvertently knackered some more - but I've managed to get WinXP (of sorts) working on it to extrapilate some of my files and settings for the new build. Just a thought.. I refuse to upgrade to Vista until it has at least one tried and tested service pack on. Blooming Microsoft springs to mind....

Killer Instinct wrote:

One question. Didn't you bother to start WinXP in safe mode and attempt to roll back the update that knacked the PC, or find out why it was crashing at startup? Vista for all the eye candy may appear to be wonderful, but it has it's drawbacks it's infancy for starters and of course the inablilty to play Oolite! I've just gone through a major re-build session with WinXP because I had a knackered hard drive which I inadvertently knackered some more - but I've managed to get WinXP (of sorts) working on it to extrapilate some of my files and settings for the new build. Just a thought.. I refuse to upgrade to Vista until it has at least one tried and tested service pack on. Blooming Microsoft springs to mind....

XP would restart in any boot scenario, regardless of what mode selected... it chrased during a shut down while it was updating, result = corrupted files in mass... and since the files needed to fix it was downloaded = i do/did not have acces to these new files... I opted for a new install... now i know people around here that has acces to licenses for Vista.. He threw me a good deal on Vista Ultimate, and yes Vista has its "child" sicknesses, like every new OS, but eventually its new GFX interface will be faster than ordinary XP PRO... I´m learning to deal with Vista now, instead of 6 months from now...

Oh and btw im running Oolite ATM with a FX 5200 i had lying around... my only beef is that there seem to be no gamma setting ability in the Nvidia Drivers for it... That, and that my screen is very dark... with the brightes setting at maximum

Cheers Frame...