[eicca]

Whenever there's a big explosion (warheads, big ships, etc), anything with shockwaves, there's this horrible flickering that happens and sometimes I can see big squares around the shockwave area. This occurs on my machine with the Intel HD3000 GPU and my uncle's 2010 iMac with some way nicer nVidia. I can only assume it's an issue with shaders. Disabling framebuffer shockwaves solves the issue but doesn't look as cool and I have to believe I'm not the only one who's seen this issue.

Log attached. The game crashed right at shooting down a warhead.

[attachment DELETED!! by Strong Bad]

[Mongoose]

At least in your case, an Intel HD3000 is waaaay outclassed when it comes to FS2 Open's more advanced features.  Older integrated cards were never really meant for gaming purposes, so they just don't have the firepower or feature-set to handle more complicated graphical effects.  Usually we recommend people with such cards to disable post-processing entirely, but if you can get by with just losing the shockwaves, you're already ahead of the game.  In your uncle's case, even if he has a discrete video card, the fact that it's from a 2010 system could mean that he has the same fundamental problem (and from what I understand Apple wasn't exactly great with their OpenGL support back then).  Trust me, I fully sympathize with this: at least until my current system build, I was stuck on a Radeon HD4670 for several years, and by the end it was in over its head when it came to FS2 as well.

[eicca]

So an older driver/rendering method/whatever is at fault on both machines. Makes sense. It's just a little irritating though, his iMac can handle FSOpen maxxed out, lightshafts and everything, at well over 1080p but still flickers with the explosions... You'd think it'd be able to get at least the lower-end rendering right.

[jr2]

I think there's some custom flags you can use to disable certain parts of the advanced rendering that allow FSO to behave properly on Intel / older graphics cards.  I know -no_glsl was one, but IIRC there were some in-between ones you could use that wouldn't completely drop advanced shader support?

[AdmiralRalwood]

I think there's some custom flags you can use to disable certain parts of the advanced rendering that allow FSO to behave properly on Intel / older graphics cards.  I know -no_glsl was one, but IIRC there were some in-between ones you could use that wouldn't completely drop advanced shader support?

Are you thinking of -disable_glsl_model? It was removed 8 months ago.

[jr2]

Yeah, probably that.

[eicca]

I'll just turn off framebuffer shockwaves for now I guess. I rather like the thruster shaders to and I don't seem to have any issues with them.