[Dark RevenantX]

The screenshots say it all.

AMD Athlon 64 5600+
4 GB Crucial Ballistix DDR2 Memory
ATi Radeon HD 4870 (512 MB)
Running on Microsoft Windows Vista 64 Bit

Maxed out settings (1650x1024 resolution - monitor limited to that) in the launcher and in my driver settings...  60 fps constantly through all action.  Fraps makes it become 2 fps, but that's because my hard drive is fragmented to hell and back.


I took some glory shots (driver settings not maxed in these, and it's windowed at 1440x960 or whatever the step below 16x10 is)...

[attachment stolen by Slimey Goober]

[MikeRoz]

Your HUD is truly psychedelic.

Probably what broke it.

To try and contribute something useful: what version of FSOpen is this? What version drivers are you running?

[Dark RevenantX]

All 3.6.10 builds give me this effect.  I'm using the latest ATi Catalyst drivers for the HD 4870...

[ARSPR]

I'm no expert but try to narrow if it is a FSO problem or a driver problem downgrading and testing with previous Catalyst drivers.

If you switch between drivers and the problem is gone, blame ATi/AMD...

A previous example but nvidia GPUs. ForceWare 169.xx series, which were released for Crysis, broke OGL rendering with funny looking artifacts as explained as a summary here: http://www.hard-light.net/forums/index.php/topic,53110.msg1073368.html#msg1073368)

[Wanderer]

Run debug build and let us see the fs2_open.log - http://www.hard-light.net/forums/index.php/topic,56279.msg1180359.html#msg1180359 (the standard log for starters)

[Aardwolf]

I had a similar issue with a program I made on my own. It could be completely unrelated, but in my program I got messed up (white) polygons on debris, and it turned out it was because the debris had been sloppily cut from a larger mesh and the vertex normals were messed up.

See if the vertex normals (less sophisticated term "smoothing groups") are borked on those debris chunks.

Edit: I looked at those debris pieces in pcs2, I was right. They've got smooth edges where the edges should be sharp/creased.

[Dark RevenantX]

It only happens when the damage lightning happens.  It's probably a lighting issue.

[attachment stolen by Slimey Goober]

[FUBAR-BDHR]

I just saw the same thing in multi.  Instead of the arching electrical effect some of the panels turned white.  They were right in the path of the effect.  It wasn't all of them just some of them.  This was on an Arcadia. 

[chief1983]

Does this happen on revision 5024 or earlier, before the OS X GLSL fix?

[taylor]

It's actually an old problem, with shaders, and for the most part only affects debris.  I think that it is a problem with the debris itself, as Aardwolf suggests, but I never bothered to track it down.

It is a problem triggered by the light source of the damage lightning being too close to the face of the model.  It will happen from other things too, not just the damage lightning, if the light source gets too close.  I got around this for the most part before by adding a little hack to the shaders that prevented the light source from getting too close.  Bad geometry is bad geometry though and no amount of little hacks is really going to do anything to fix the problem.  The most that such hacks will do is hide it.  It's likely just going to take someone going in and fixing the geometry to really solve it.  And this problem is by no means the only one that shaders make a big deal over.  Shaders deal with rendering differently, when using normal maps specifically, and if there is any problem with the geometry then you are definitely going to see it.

[FUBAR-BDHR]

What I saw was on the Arcadia was on the whole model before it blew up not just the debris.  At one point about 1/3 of the entire station turned white. 

[Dark RevenantX]

The current arcadia model has the same geometry as the retail version, so that makes sense.

[Logrus]

Have the same problem on ATI 4870 with 3.6.10 vp's.
Did not experience this with 3.6.10 beta.

[General Battuta]

Have the same problem on ATI 4870 with 3.6.10 vp's.
Did not experience this with 3.6.10 beta.

Yep, got it too on the same card. Looks like it's at least in part an ATI card issue (and Taylor's explanation up above makes perfect sense.)

[Logrus]

Any ideas on how to fix it?

[General Battuta]

I haven't updated the catalyst drivers in a while.

Otherwise, no idea.

[Jeff Vader]

The only thing that comes to mind is that you could try installing the latest drivers for your (Ati) graphics card and placing this file to your \freespace2\ folder. People have had good (and bad) results with this procedure.

Of course, some people have had corrupt MediaVPs so redownloading those, possibly from a different mirror, might also help.

[Logrus]

Unfortunately it did not help...

[taylor]

See if the attached VP does anything.

I had previously fixed a math issue that caused the white problem on NVIDIA cards (just a bug in my original shaders) and so I removed the old distance hack.  This updated set of vertex shaders simply adds that old hack back in.  If it's just the same problem then this should fix it, and in that case somebody really just needs to go through and fix all of the geometry problems in these models properly.

Also note that these updated vertex shaders are based on my originals (with the conditional return for lights), NOT what is in the MediaVPs (which does not have the conditional return), so keep that in mind.

[attachment stolen by Slimey Goober]

[Logrus]

YES!
It works! Thank you very much!