Hard Light Productions Forums

Modding, Mission Design, and Coding => FS2 Open Coding - The Source Code Project (SCP) => Topic started by: Dark RevenantX on January 07, 2009, 11:34:59 pm

Title: The Blinding White Light of Death
Post by: Dark RevenantX on January 07, 2009, 11:34:59 pm
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]
Title: Re: The Blinding White Light of Death
Post by: MikeRoz on January 07, 2009, 11:49:24 pm
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?
Title: Re: The Blinding White Light of Death
Post by: Dark RevenantX on January 08, 2009, 12:14:04 am
All 3.6.10 builds give me this effect.  I'm using the latest ATi Catalyst drivers for the HD 4870...
Title: Re: The Blinding White Light of Death
Post by: ARSPR on January 08, 2009, 01:31:35 am
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)
Title: Re: The Blinding White Light of Death
Post by: Wanderer on January 08, 2009, 02:10:06 am
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)
Title: Re: The Blinding White Light of Death
Post by: Aardwolf on January 08, 2009, 10:36:42 am
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.
Title: Re: The Blinding White Light of Death
Post by: Dark RevenantX on January 08, 2009, 05:51:19 pm
It only happens when the damage lightning happens.  It's probably a lighting issue.

[attachment stolen by Slimey Goober]
Title: Re: The Blinding White Light of Death
Post by: FUBAR-BDHR on January 08, 2009, 10:06:42 pm
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. 
Title: Re: The Blinding White Light of Death
Post by: chief1983 on January 08, 2009, 11:05:07 pm
Does this happen on revision 5024 or earlier, before the OS X GLSL fix?
Title: Re: The Blinding White Light of Death
Post by: taylor on January 08, 2009, 11:40:36 pm
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.
Title: Re: The Blinding White Light of Death
Post by: FUBAR-BDHR on January 08, 2009, 11:43:58 pm
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. 
Title: Re: The Blinding White Light of Death
Post by: Dark RevenantX on January 08, 2009, 11:57:21 pm
The current arcadia model has the same geometry as the retail version, so that makes sense.
Title: Re: The Blinding White Light of Death
Post by: Logrus on January 18, 2009, 03:44:34 am
Have the same problem on ATI 4870 with 3.6.10 vp's.
Did not experience this with 3.6.10 beta.
Title: Re: The Blinding White Light of Death
Post by: General Battuta on January 18, 2009, 10:37:11 am
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.)
Title: Re: The Blinding White Light of Death
Post by: Logrus on January 18, 2009, 11:35:01 pm
Any ideas on how to fix it?
Title: Re: The Blinding White Light of Death
Post by: General Battuta on January 18, 2009, 11:54:41 pm
I haven't updated the catalyst drivers in a while.

Otherwise, no idea.
Title: Re: The Blinding White Light of Death
Post by: Jeff Vader on January 19, 2009, 03:01:49 am
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 (http://koti.mbnet.fi/reiler/FunkyFreeSpaceStuff/atioglxx.dll) 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.
Title: Re: The Blinding White Light of Death
Post by: Logrus on January 19, 2009, 09:18:27 am
Unfortunately it did not help...:(
Title: Re: The Blinding White Light of Death
Post by: taylor on January 19, 2009, 01:44:51 pm
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]
Title: Re: The Blinding White Light of Death
Post by: Logrus on January 21, 2009, 09:42:21 am
YES!
It works! Thank you very much! :yes:
Title: Re: The Blinding White Light of Death
Post by: chief1983 on March 05, 2009, 04:34:34 pm
Was this the location of the ma-sdrvfix.vp file?  I can't seem to find it again.  I just thought I would mention that during my testing of it, the shaders failed to compile for some reason.  However when I swapped in Zacam's recent Zuper Shader release they resumed compiling just fine.
Title: Re: The Blinding White Light of Death
Post by: taylor on March 05, 2009, 06:32:30 pm
Yeah it was an attachment on my earlier post and the attachment has since been deleted.  I'm pretty sure that Zacam's recent set includes the fix though, so ma-sdrvfix.vp shouldn't be needed any longer.
Title: Re: The Blinding White Light of Death
Post by: Ungoy on May 09, 2009, 10:46:27 am
Sorry to bring up an older thread, but I have downloaded what I think are the latest mediavps from Zacam, and I'm having the messed up white textures showing up with the damage lightning. I've looked all over for a fix to this. Apparently, the older ATI OpenGL driver .dlls aren't compatible with the newer 4800 series,as Freespace 2 crashes every time I try to use them. I was interested in that ma-sdrvfix.vp file, but I can't find it anywhere.

Is there anything I can do to correct this without disabling GLSL? My specs are:

Athlon X2 2.6 Ghz
2 GB RAM
ATI Radeon 4830 using Catalyst 9.4 drivers.

I'm using the most current 3.6.10 files that I can find.

Please help!
Title: Re: The Blinding White Light of Death
Post by: General Battuta on May 09, 2009, 10:48:21 am
Here is the shader fix! Extract to your MediaVPs folder.


[attachment deleted by ninja]
Title: Re: The Blinding White Light of Death
Post by: Ungoy on May 09, 2009, 10:59:32 am
Works perfectly! Thanks!
Title: Re: The Blinding White Light of Death
Post by: jakeslogan on November 23, 2009, 06:53:05 am
Sorry to bring up this topic, but for some reasons I'm not able to download the latest Media VPs at this time, I'm now using the Media VPs from December 2008. I've just changed my card to a HD4800, so I'm having the "white and lightning" problem. I've looked for ma-sdrvfix.vp but so far no luck. Maybe it's been deleted. It'll be great if anyone here upload it again for me. :)

#Edit: no need to upload anymore, I've spotted it here. Admin, moderator or staff if you read this please don't delete the file again, I think it really useful for people like me who cannot upgrade Media VPs at this time.(My place's internet bandwidth is extremely low so download a large size file is impossible.) Thanks. :D
http://www.hard-light.net/forums/index.php?topic=61209.20
Title: Re: The Blinding White Light of Death
Post by: chief1983 on November 23, 2009, 09:37:36 am
Attachments are deleted via an automated script, they're not removed by hand.  If it's important it needs to be uploaded somewhere to a more permanent storage than a forum post.