Oolite Bulletins

Hi folks - nice to see Elite again after so many years

I loaded Oolite 1.72.1 on Vista 32bit PC with Nvidia 9800GTX+ video card.

When starting the program, on the opening screen the rotating Cobra textures are usually (not always) partially corrupted i.e. multi coloured pattern effect. Same on Coriolis textures during game play.
Happens in windowed and full screen mode.

I've deleted the program and re-installed but same problem

Any thoughts on how to correct the problem?

thanks

Are you running any OXP's?
Also, is it possible for you to post a screenshot of this when it happens?

Clean install, no OXP's installed

Not sure how to take a screen shot, I just get a black screen when I use PrtSc. I'll Google print screen and see what I can find

Just press '*' and the screenshot should be saved in the oolite-saves folder under a filename like oolite-###.bmp.

OK, got a screen shot but how do I attach it to this post?

Hi DGill - welcome to the forums

To get a piccie on here it must already hosted somewhere else on the web and then you just put the hyperlink to it inside the [ img] [ /img] tabs and your image will appear. If you don't have any webspace of your own to host the picture then I would suggest getting an account with Photobucket - it's quick, easy and free...

may be an image below!

[img][img]http://i552.photobucket.com/albums/jj33 ... -37-31.jpg[/img][/img]

That's quite the ship you have there... Maybe when you look at ~oolite/resources/textures/cobra3_redux.png you can find out if it is corrupted - looking at an old version 1.65 on a mac - might be different for you

png file looks fine:

[img][img]http://i552.photobucket.com/albums/jj33 ... _redux.jpg[/img][/img]

DGill wrote:

may be an image below!

[img][img]http://i552.photobucket.com/albums/jj33 ... -37-31.jpg[/img][/img]

Well that thing is similar with the texture corruption that we had in an SVN build somewhere between 1.70 and 1.71. If i remember correcty it was totally random and the pngs had nothing to do with it. Strange very strange !! (since i have been blaying with 1.72 and 1.72.1 form some time now and i haven't seen that yet

I seem to recall that a few people managed to solve problems like this one by downloading and installing the newest drivers for their graphics card.

Yeah that's definitely a driver problem..

I had OpenGL running on a FX 5200 card on vista 32 bit, so you should try and download the driver from this site... click below

http://www.nvidia.com/object/winvista_x ... _whql.html


Edit:

I just remembered that if your graphic card is getting to hot, that can also produce errors like this... but then it should be in every type of game, DirectX based or OpenGL based...

If the driver does not solve it... I recommend you to check the temperature of the card, and if its fan is working or spinning correctly...

There should be monitoring tools somewhere at Nvidia to monitor this....

I'm using an ATI card so I'm not sure where exactly to point you in order to obtain these... but try the driver first... preferably try another OpenGL based application and see if you get the same texture corruptions there..

Counter check of course with Direct X based application, or try to run with or without windows Aero enabled if you do not already do this...

Windows Aero causes a few unwanted side effects for my card, so it is turned off... and generally I like the performance of the classic view of Windows better.

Cheers Frame...

Lestradae wrote:

I seem to recall that a few people managed to solve problems like this one by downloading and installing the newest drivers for their graohics card.

I've got the problem since upgrading from the release to the test version. The problem comes in now and then, sometimes ships do not use textures at all. Vista 32 with an ATI 4870X2 2GB here.

It's not a problem of the system not having enough memory, as these things start from the beginning on, the corruption stays the same during gameplay for all ships of that type.

I guess related is the problem that nebulae sometimes are drawn nicely and sometimes as square boxes. The previous test version had this problem more often than the new one, but it's not gone entirely.

I doubt that it's graphics cards stuff, as there are two very different cards mentioned here...it rather looks like uninitialized texture memory, maybe the bitmap initialization is not working properly in all cases during first load of them, and then the texture stays cached or such?

The log does not give any hints at where it comes from. I just got somehow used to seeing this...

Screet

I'm currently using the 180.48 drivers and also tried 177.79

Heat might be a problem, I'll try with the case open - though I can run MS Flight Sim X without problem and that does stress the CPU and GPU

Turning off Aero sounds interesring, I'll give it a try

DGill wrote:

I'm currently using the 180.48 drivers and also tried 177.79

Heat might be a problem, I'll try with the case open - though I can run MS Flight Sim X without problem and that does stress the CPU and GPU

Turning off Aero sounds interesring, I'll give it a try

Aero is switched off automatically here when I run certain programs (for example together with oolite)...and heat's no problem. My system ain't even busy, I can do pretty much, there's only the memory demand of the game...and the bug drops in right when launching the game.

Maybe Vista is behaving slightly differently than XP concerning texture stuff, IF the problem is not visible under XP. I haven't tried yet with my development machine...

Furthermore, having the case open does not always help to reduce heat. Some Macs even slow down instantly because the airflow gets corrupted and thus the machine gets hotter when their case is open...

From the code side, I'd expect it to be something with the initial loading of the texture being buggy under Vista. Maybe some variable that is not properly initialized, most often read correctly, leading to correct initialization, but sometimes it's not.

Screet