Hi folks,You know, now that you mention it, I had that problem, too, although I didn't look that deeply into fixing it, since I ended up making my own builds, with limited success (more here (http://www.hard-light.net/forums/index.php?topic=83506.0)).
I recently installed BP:AOA and ran into a few problems.
First, the executable didn't decompress properly - the executable permissions didn't carry over nor did any of the symbolic links within the .app directory. That was easy enough to fix but something that should probably be addressed :)
Second, no matter what graphics settings I use there are large, blocky artifacts coming mainly from explosions and the engines of ships, but also occasionally from weapons fire. It looks like missing textures or something but I'm not receiving any error messages stating that. I've gone through the troubleshooting guide as well and nothing seems to help.No idea myself, since that's way outside of my expertise, but other people will know more, and a debug log should help a lot.
Other than that the game is mostly playable, though these artifacts make it difficult to see what I'm shooting at.
When I get home I'll hack the debug executable and make it work, then see if I can get a debug log uploaded and attached to the message. Before I do that though, any thoughts?Besides the log, a list of system specs never hurts, e.g., which Mac you have and when it's from, OS X version, CPU, graphics card, RAM, etc, although some of those things will be in the debug log. You might want to enable the FPS counter as well -- it's "Show frames per second on HUD" under "Dev Tool" in the launcher's advanced settings.
OpenGL Renderer : ATI Radeon HD 5870 OpenGL Engine
OpenGL Version : 2.1 ATI-1.0.29
2. Upgrade MacOS to a version that can do the required things (AKA 10.8)
Take a look at the thread immediately below this one in the sub-forum (http://www.hard-light.net/forums/index.php?topic=77268.0).
In short:
- Yes, Lion includes an OpenGL 3.2 profile, as well as the older OpenGL 2.1
- Programs must explicitly call, and setup, an OpenGL 3.2 profile in order to receive one. It's not like Windows where the drivers provide the best the hardware can support.
- At present, we have not modified the FS2 Open engine to call the OpenGL 3.2 profile.
patch -p0 < ~/path/to/BP.patch
tar -xf Frameworks.tgz
Essentially these known issues with Mac builds of BP are going to require the changes noted above to allow the FS2Open engine to call an OpenGL 3.2 compatible context on OS X. At present we only call a legacy OpenGL 2.1 context.
Until that happens, there is going to be some degree of 'black box' textures and the like. You'll also note that at present the z-buffering isn't working properly.
This is present even with the latest 27 January 2013 BP.patch builds.
This is something that coding efforts here will greatly improve the experience for all FS2Open engine based games.
I should be able to code it in such a way as to make it fall back gracefully to older OpenGL ICDs if a 3.2 profile isn't available.
Should be a simple comparison to see if what I requested is what I got. In any case I haven't been able to put much time into it so far - just enough to check the sources out from subversion and patch them with the BP patch and do a cursory look for what file(s) I'd have to make my changes in. It's not immediately obvious but goes with the territory when modifying a large, complex project such as this.
Whatever we can do to allow more people to play is really good in my book.
I am 100% with you on that but I know nothing about the technical feasibility thereof.
Whatever we can do to allow more people to play is really good in my book.
Releasing alternate builds that don't include the new graphics code would be a great move towards that goal IMO. That would allow people having graphics-related problems with the current builds to play now using the tried and true standard rendering pipelines. They'd only be a short term solution, but since deferred rendering and shadows may not be in trunk for at least a little while, they'd do for now.
EDIT: [selfpromotion]I have posted unofficial OS X builds here (http://www.hard-light.net/forums/index.php?topic=83318.msg1669065#msg1669065) that attempt to do just that.[/selfpromotion]
Literally this code change should be no more than 10 lines.
Literally this code change should be no more than 10 lines.
This is precisely what I was speculating. Enough code to see whether we're running on/compiled for OS X, call the context, check to see if the context is valid, then fall back if not. The rest of the code should remain unchanged.
Thanks for the hints about where to look, what to change, and that SDL should probably be upgraded :) I might have some time on Sunday to work on this - I'll post whatever I come up with.
The issue there was caused by some new glowpoints code that was added just for the BP builds, although it'll get into trunk eventually. There were some additional table features enabled by that code ($Glowpoint overrides:), and that's what I commented out. The crash/freeze occurred because the regular ship table parser couldn't process those table lines.
the only minor glitch left for me is in ship/weapon selection where I get strange thin, green down lines (hard to describe) rotating in sync with the model in the left hand side of the screen - like part of a wireframe model, but shifted half a screen to the left of the actual model. It doesn't affect anything though.
Thanks again for the suggestion - much appreciated !
I might have some time on Sunday to work on this
I might have some time on Sunday to work on this
... And I didn't. Ended up getting called to work. :(