Hard Light Productions Forums

Hosted Projects - FS2 Required => Blue Planet => Topic started by: Freon on May 21, 2014, 10:15:19 pm

Title: Technical questions/issues wrt Blue Planet
Post by: Freon on May 21, 2014, 10:15:19 pm
Hello all. I've been lurking here for a while, drooling over every piece of Blue Planet news and swifty shadow build update. Magnificent work on all fronts.
But I have had some issues, well maybe not even issues, but changes from what I expected to see.

SUPERBLOOM
I've been playing the FS2 campaign with the 3.7.2 RC and MediaVPs_2014, which are beautiful, and saw everything I expected to see. But when I started Blue Planet, when I was zooming around the Orestes waiting to depart for Earth, I was suddenly blinded. Like 100% white screen for several seconds. I tracked it down to the star, kinda seems like the old bloom effect before lightshafts only 100000x more powerful... This has happened in a few missions with environment light sources, but not all.  It can make entire levels unplayable. Kinda hard to dogfight when you can't see anything including your own HUD.

GHOST NODES
This is something I also noticed with swifty's shadow build, and I assume it's a bug, not a feature.  The wireframe of the nodes doesn't render. It just isn't there. Targeting the node gives the usual target corners, but nothing inside. Got super lost in Ross 128 chasing the Duke and couldn't see the node...

CRASH-wait no...it's back
The load screen (with the dots) fills the first dot, then I get tossed back to the desktop, where I promptly rage and go to event viewer to see if I can fix it, when it comes back good as new with all the dots filled in. Not a serious problem I guess, but it's weird.


EDIT: I also wasn't able to run it with the MediaVPs_2014 as the primary list. I remember GeneralBattuta saying something about this but can't find it anymore.  I've been running with the 3612 vps as primary, and the 2014's as secondary.


Hope someone can shed some light on whether these things are known about or bugs or features or if I broke something.

Setup
Most recent BP build (3.7.1_SSE2_BP)
Old i7 (pre AVX)
ATI HD 7950

Debug log, but I couldn't get the bloom thing to happen in it (go figure).

[attachment deleted by an evil time traveler]
Title: Re: Technical questions/issues wrt Blue Planet
Post by: The E on May 22, 2014, 12:39:37 am
1. Don't use the bp builds. They were and are experimental for a reason.
2. Bp is currently not compatible with the latest MediaVPs. Putting them in the primarylist will cause errors, because that's the completely wrong place for them.
Title: Re: Technical questions/issues wrt Blue Planet
Post by: Freon on May 22, 2014, 01:48:22 am
I thought the BP builds were necessary for BP, but ok. I'll grab the compatibility thing for 3.7.2 RC.
I take it putting them in secondary is either useless or incompatible as well? Should I just not use them for BP at all?
Title: Re: Technical questions/issues wrt Blue Planet
Post by: AdmiralRalwood on May 22, 2014, 02:24:21 am
You shouldn't have to mess with the mod.ini for BP at all. If your [multimod] section of the blueplanet2/mod.ini file looks any different than this:
Code: [Select]
[multimod]
primarylist  = ;
secondarylist = blueplanet,mediavps_3612;
...You're just asking for trouble.
Title: Re: Technical questions/issues wrt Blue Planet
Post by: Freon on May 22, 2014, 03:39:31 am
I see. Looks like I somehow have an older version or something.
Just for fun, I edited mine to look like yours, and using any of the other builds, incl nightlies with the bp-compat.vp, I get some error about ship tables being wrong.

So I might just reinstall the whole lot again and see if the problem remains.
Thanks for the help guys/gals.
Title: Re: Technical questions/issues wrt Blue Planet
Post by: Luis Dias on May 22, 2014, 03:47:07 am
Are you by any chance playing with the debug build? You don't have to, the normal builds will bypass those sort of errors without any problem.
Title: Re: Technical questions/issues wrt Blue Planet
Post by: Freon on May 22, 2014, 04:05:09 am
No, I was just using the normal builds. 3.7.2 RC, 3.7.0 Final, 3.7.x nightly, all showed the splash screen, then cut to black and sometimes back to desktop with the error, or had to ctrl+alt+del to get there.
I'm in the process of getting all the files again (deleted them, who knows why...), so maybe I just had some weird files or settings.
Title: Re: Technical questions/issues wrt Blue Planet
Post by: Freon on May 22, 2014, 06:09:50 am
Ok, so it looks like there was something weird with my install.
Game starts, nodes are back, and the bloom thing hasn't happened yet.

I do still get the weird loadscreen-flick-to-desktop thing though.
EDIT: And I swear my HUD isn't the right size, as if the resolution is wrong. But that's set in the launcher...  Found a HUD table override, but it makes me nervous since BP is supposed to have its own (I thought).
Title: Re: Technical questions/issues wrt Blue Planet
Post by: AdmiralRalwood on May 22, 2014, 01:02:04 pm
BP does have its own HUD. I believe there is a newer version than the one included in the last release floating around, however... a quick search provides this link (https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/89353583/FreeSpace/Blue%20Planet/bp2_fixed_hud.zip), although it shouldn't make a difference if you're playing with a widescreen resolution.

Perhaps you should try reinstalling BP Complete and the compatibility packages?
Title: Re: Technical questions/issues wrt Blue Planet
Post by: Freon on May 22, 2014, 06:29:32 pm
I was fairly sure it did. Never had this problem the last 50 times I've played :)
Well reinstalling BP AoA didn't work so for now, I'll just use that table you linked.   My computer has been doing weird things for a while, maybe this is related.
Thanks for all the help everyone :)
Title: Re: Technical questions/issues wrt Blue Planet
Post by: AdmiralRalwood on May 22, 2014, 10:04:35 pm
Well reinstalling BP AoA didn't work
I said BP Complete, not BP AoA. I believe it is recommended to play AoA through the blueplanet2 mod?
Title: Re: Technical questions/issues wrt Blue Planet
Post by: Freon on May 22, 2014, 11:42:27 pm
Oh boy...Looks like I've been going about this the wrong way for ages.
Ok I'll get that, clear everything again and see what happens.
Title: Re: Technical questions/issues wrt Blue Planet
Post by: General Battuta on May 23, 2014, 12:08:35 am
It's completely fine to play Blue Planet by selecting blueplanet in the launcher. You can also play it by selecting blueplanet2 and playing the Blue Planet campaign.
Title: Re: Technical questions/issues wrt Blue Planet
Post by: Freon on May 23, 2014, 05:33:22 am
Well even after fixing my abysmal failure to install BP, it still has it's issues. But I'm going to blame my PC as it's doing a lot of weird things.
Anyway, the load screen thing is annoying rather than game breaking, and the HUD override seems to work.

All of this is in the AoA campaign btw.