[Wanderer]

Upgrade to 163.71 fixed it.. I started downloading new drivers after i had written the driver version there...

And to why i sticked with 93.71... I never before had even slightest problem with them. 'Don't fix what ain't broken'...

[Cobra]

That's a known driver bug, you'll have to upgrade to something newer.  NVIDIA somehow managed to break GLSL support in the 93.xx series. 

Are you ****TING ME?!

Muh. Taylor, could you help find a driver that doesn't make my card crap out over everything? the latest drivers crash windows for me.

[Turey]

...I myself have started using NVidia's Quadro drivers on my card. They give better Direct3D performance for some absurd reason (ForceWare drivers cause some anomalous stuttering on many games even though the frame rate is good) and the latest ForceWare was giving me really strange video errors (the image being almost completely black and only the parts with extreme contrast visible - almost like viewing a sharpen mask but not quite) after some time of using the PC, and only restarting it took it away...

I actually have a NVidia Quadro NVS 140, and it has no trouble with this build. Yay!

[taylor]

Muh. Taylor, could you help find a driver that doesn't make my card crap out over everything? the latest drivers crash windows for me.

I don't use Windows, so I'm not someone to go to for video driver advice there.    When needed (if upgrading someone's Windows box), I always just go with the newest driver, and that's all.

Technically the shaders can be modified to still work with the 93.xx series though.  Unfortunately that "fix" comes with a 20-60% performance penalty for everyone, which is why I refused to make the default shaders compatible with those broken drivers (like I did to get around some ATI issues, which didn't hurt performance a measurable amount).

i'm using the new omega drivers, so old drivers wouldnt be the cause of my problem.  do you have any ideas for me?

No ideas so far, but I'm trying to think of some.  Unfortunately in your case, we know what the problem is (from the debug log), just not what caused it, and that makes things complicated.  I'll try to have something for you by the end of the day, even if it's only a new build to help debug the problem better.

EDIT:  Well, some quick Google searching later, and I think it's going to boil down to the drivers.  What version are you using now?  I know that you said the newest Omega drivers, but for all I know that could mean the newest from last year.   I went to look at what the current driver version is, and a new version was released just last week (version 3.8.413).  Might be worth a try if that's not what you are already using.

[Turambar]

uninstalling and reinstalling with drivercleaner in between and it still won't behave properly.

any other ideas?

[ARSPR]

Great Taylor. Ulysses has never looked better. Now it even seems a good fighter. 

One thing, people should test. Performance. These builds run smoother (more FPS) than old ones while looking BETTER.

BUT at least in my system I've got bigger slowdowns the very first time effects, (explosions, shockwaves, etc.) are triggered,...

[Cobra]

Right. Got the latest (beta) driver, and it all works now. Ships with normal mapping look ****in' sweet.

MOAR NORMALS!

I do have one complaint though. From the start, when I try to view ship models, the game is very choppy for a few minutes, then it's fine for everything else.

[jr2]

We need a bowing smilie.

Will the new test shaders do anything with subspace vortexes?

http://images.devshed.com/fdh/smilies/honorhim.gif   

Others, with their codes from another forum (Dev Hardware)

:zmachine: http://images.devshed.com/fdh/smilies/z1.gif
:2pistols: http://images.devshed.com/fdh/smilies/2gunsfir.gif 
:cheers: http://images.devshed.com/fdh/smilies/beerchug.gif
:sniper: http://images.devshed.com/fdh/smilies/camper.gif
:chomp: http://images.devshed.com/fdh/smilies/banghead.gif
:tmgho: http://images.devshed.com/fdh/smilies/mgwhore.gif
:tntworth: http://images.devshed.com/fdh/smilies/honorhim.gif

[Herra Tohtori]

This is not a code issue or problem, just something I noticed and how to fix it...

There's (at least one) mis-named file in the normalmap pack, namely fighter03-01a.dds, which should be fighter03-01a-normal. It causes the Shivan Dragon to be greenishly transparent and damn ugly. So if your SF Dragon looks green and partially transparent, it's because of this, not because of any card/driver issue (because it uses intended normal map as a texture, which doesn't work very well as you can imagine.

I fixed it by extracting the file from the normalmap VP to ..\normalmaps\data\maps\ and renamed it appropriately; then extracted the Dragon texture (real fighter03-01a.dds) from MediaVP's, and shoved that to the same normalmaps data subdirectory to override the mistakenly named file.

[Cobra]

I didn't see anything wrong with the Dragon, just blurry textures.

[EDIT]OK, well...

The Fenris and Dragon normals don't seem to be working.

[Herra Tohtori]

This is what I'm getting with the fix disabled.

At least in my normalmaps pack there is a greenish, low opaque texture named fighter03-01a.dds when it's supposed to be normal map.


I'm guessing that your mod command line options cause the MediaVP version of that same file to override the one in normalmaps (or you put the normalmaps VP to mediaVP's and the correct one is loaded first because m becomes before n in alphabets or something as trivial as that).

But, I bet you don't see the normals on the Dragon either without the fix, eh?

This is what I see with the filename fix enabled:

[Cobra]

yeah, I put the normalmaps.vp in the mediavps. I might have better luck putting it in base.

Or renaming it.

[Hades]

How do I get the normal maps to work?
I have them enabled, and it is in the media VPs folder, but it is not working.
Help?

[Cobra]

What video card do you have? We just went over this.

[Hades]

Mobile Intel(R) 945GM Express Chipset Family.
I think.

[Cobra]

It sucks, you can't use normal maps.

No seriously, you're on a laptop, and you have an integrated card. I don't think it has GLSL support. That or you don't have -normal on.

[Herra Tohtori]

If you have -normal on your cmdline, run a debug build and see what the OpenGL init part tells about GLSL.

If it can't use it, make sure you are using latest drivers for the GPU... apart from that there's very little you can do.

[Hades]

It sucks, you can't use normal maps.

No seriously, you're on a laptop, and you have an integrated card. I don't think it has GLSL support. That or you don't have -normal on.

Awww.

[taylor]

One thing, people should test. Performance. These builds run smoother (more FPS) than old ones while looking BETTER.

BUT at least in my system I've got bigger slowdowns the very first time effects, (explosions, shockwaves, etc.) are triggered,...

Yeah, that's something that I do need feedback on from everyone.  I also randomly get bigger slowdowns at certain times.  None of those effects use the new shader code, so it shouldn't matter, but neither ARSPR or myself are able to get the same slowdowns when not using GLSL.  So, any feedback from any of you would be helpful with this.

I do have one complaint though. From the start, when I try to view ship models, the game is very choppy for a few minutes, then it's fine for everything else.

That is something new, just started doing that last week sometime.  I'm not sure what it is, but it seemed like a minor enough issue that I'm not really worried about it (yet).  Of course, that's if we are talking about the same thing.  The choppiness that I tend to get (which is random) only lasts about a second or so.

The game does need to regenerate IBX files when using -normal though, so initial loads of all models will always be slower than they are otherwise.  I had to add tangent space data for each vertex, but instead of breaking IBX files to do it I added a new *.tsb file instead, which is a companion to it's IBX file.  Unfortunately, to get the TSB file, the IBX file has to be regenerated too, even though the IBX file ends up exactly the same.

[Cobra]

Well, it also happened in the main menu and the lab with nothing loaded. Were all the model caches being written from the very start?