Hard Light Productions Forums

Modding, Mission Design, and Coding => The Modding Workshop => Topic started by: IPAndrews on June 13, 2007, 05:17:03 pm

Title: Can anyone explain this?
Post by: IPAndrews on June 13, 2007, 05:17:03 pm
Can anyone explain what the frack is going on here?

This is the Thirdspace capital ship, and it looks lovely. For about half a minute. The ship looks fine from a distance but as soon as you get close to it (and presumably the engine changes to the highest detail level) another texture is suddenly overlayed on the ships two existing, correct textures. The overlayed texture is from a completely different ship!

Please see the attatched image. The ship has only two textures. The purple one applied to the hull and the light blue shimmering one applied to...  :nervous: it's balls. Overlayed over both these textures seems to be the glowmap from another ship in the mission, which is supposed to make a hanger bay glow red. What's more as the mission progresses this overlayed map is replaced with other maps. It's always a glowmap though. Which makes me think maybe this is a glowmap related issue...

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Title: Re: Can anyone explain this?
Post by: Topgun on June 13, 2007, 06:31:00 pm
show us the other lod.
Title: Re: Can anyone explain this?
Post by: Bobboau on June 13, 2007, 06:54:01 pm
especially if you can repete this, make sure taylor hears about this.
Title: Re: Can anyone explain this?
Post by: IPAndrews on June 14, 2007, 04:21:45 am
Well this happens every time I try and use this ship. Also before I went to bed last night I started a mission. The ship appeared correctly as always. Then changed to the external view of this ship, so I was looking at LOD0 at it was correct!. Then about 30 seconds into the mission, it suddenly corrupts.  :wtf:

I'll post a screen of the ship as it should appear tonight for comparison.
Title: Re: Can anyone explain this?
Post by: Nuke on June 14, 2007, 04:28:45 am
isnt this the too many textures bug (or rather a feature considering the game only supports about 2000 bitmaps (animation frames each count to the limit), that or somethings screwing up env mapping. specifically the env map is getting replaced with a glow map because youre over the map limit. try removing a few bitmaps from the game and see if the problem presists. if thats the case youre options are to reduce the number of frames in animations, restrict the number of textures used per ship to 1 or 2, or remove weapon bitmaps. if youre trying to use a 200 frame animated texture, thats probibly your problem.
Title: Re: Can anyone explain this?
Post by: IPAndrews on June 14, 2007, 05:20:29 am
Yes it would make sense that the glowmap bitmap for the ship is pointing at a texture in a texture buffer somewhere. In this case the wrong texture. Thing is there are only two ships in the mission. The player's fighter, and the capship with the problem. Neither of which have animating textures. I fail to see how that could put the game anywhere near the 2k bitmap limit.

I will also try this evening though removing some animated textures from the mod which are not used in the mission. On the off chance they are loaded regardless. Seems unlikely but what the hell. I'll try anything :)
Title: Re: Can anyone explain this?
Post by: IPAndrews on June 14, 2007, 09:17:25 am
Command line of fsopen running on a machine where this isn't a problem:

fs2_open_rt.exe -spec -glow -env -jpgtga -mipmap -dualscanlines -orbradar -ship_choice_3d -3dwarp -tbp -ambient_factor 60
Title: Re: Can anyone explain this?
Post by: Nuke on June 14, 2007, 10:49:00 am
you could try clearing any env maps from the cache (the ones generated by the engine)
Title: Re: Can anyone explain this?
Post by: IPAndrews on June 14, 2007, 11:20:03 am
I'm not sure what that means.
Title: Re: Can anyone explain this?
Post by: Nuke on June 14, 2007, 11:31:20 am
if you looked in your cache folder, which is where ibxes are stored you will notice some dds files containing cubemaps for use in env mapping. if you open them up and see that glow texture as part of it, delete it. its entirely possible that something goofed somewhere and some how that got rendered into the cubemap by the engine. even if it was a one time goof because of an odd configuration. it would still get saved in the cubemap and would be seen every time.
Title: Re: Can anyone explain this?
Post by: IPAndrews on June 15, 2007, 05:16:39 am
Deleted the whole cache folder, made not a jot of difference. I can see how you came up with the guess though.
Title: Re: Can anyone explain this?
Post by: taylor on June 15, 2007, 11:13:22 am
Grab one of my Xt builds (from http://icculus.org/~taylor/fso/willrobinson, they vary in stability so you may need to grab more than one to test with), and try to replicate the problem.  If you can then go into the lab and try to replicate the problem there.  Switch the various LODs to figure out which one has the problem, and turn on/off the various maps to see exactly which is creating the problem.  Let me know the results.