Author Topic: Let's fix the "nothing works" PCS2 bug!  (Read 1541 times)

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Offline Aardwolf

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Let's fix the "nothing works" PCS2 bug!
Several people (usually people with embedded Intel graphics cards, like me) have reported that PCS2 crashes when they select just about any of the tabs.

I was able to determine on my own that the problem occurs when the game tries to draw what the code calls "omnipoints." Omnipoints have a position, and may also have a radius and a direction/vector. They are (when working properly) drawn as a sphere at the position, with the given radius, and with a cylinder with axis parallel to the direction vector and length proportional (equal?) to it. Things like gun-points, turrets, paths, subsystems, etc., are all drawn using these omnipoints, and whenever the view is switched to a mode that would display them, or whenever an entity that is drawn using omnipoints is added, PCS2 crashes.

I also determined that the problem is in some way related to OpenGL VBOs, and initially suspected that the checkbox to enable/disable them was being ignored. However, Kazan's investigation of that possibility did not lead to an immediate fix.

As I posted here, the error happened in an Intel OpenGL-related driver dll, iglicd32.dll, and I hypothesized when I made that post that an OpenGL function might have been given bad inputs or otherwise performed an illegal operation. Id est, the driver is probably functioning properly, or as good as it's going to, but it is being told (by PCS2) to do something it can't do, so it crashes.

Here are some links to seemingly relevant code from the SourceForge revision history for PCS2:


I suggest we try to help Kazan out with this. Anyone interested?

I posted something like this before, but the forum glitched and all posts during a 48-hour period (including the one about this) were lost... Anyway, trying again now!
« Last Edit: September 17, 2009, 11:27:05 am by Aardwolf »