[Cobra]

funny, i downloaded an OpenAL installer that WMCoolmon posted. weird. ah well.

[EDIT] ok, i've got all my effects working now. it was -img2dds that was screwing everything up. weird. (but now i have slowdowns again )

but now JAD 2: Electric Boogaloo won't load.

[WMCoolmon]

funny, i downloaded an OpenAL installer that WMCoolmon posted. weird. ah well.

Well, I've been pretty consistently linking to the Creative site's download, or the OpenAL site's download, both of which are supposedly updated to 1.1. You might've downloaded it before the update...generally I don't try and update every single one of my (checks) 9000 posts whenever a new software update comes out.

[StratComm]

Cobra, I know you've posted them before, but what are your system specs?  With the consistancy that you seem to be able to reproduce this effect, I'm wondering if img2dds isn't causing some funky collisions with what I am assuming is a less-than-optimal amount of system memory.

[taylor]

[EDIT] ok, i've got all my effects working now. it was -img2dds that was screwing everything up. weird. (but now i have slowdowns again )

The -img2dds option can cause some strangeness if the drivers or the video card aren't really good enough to use it.  That's one reason that I wanted you to upgrade your video drivers.  The only current -img2dds problems that I know of right now are big-endian (OS X) related but those problems can be dealt with.  I haven't seen exactly what problems you are seeing with it and from the screenshots it does look memory related somehow.  -img2dds will read a full quality image, test if it can be compressed, upload it to the video card, the video drivers compress it, it's grabs the compressed image and sends it back out to replace the original full quality version.  More memory is needed to compress something than the original image uses at first but the original image data is discarded and replaced with it's compressed version, which is what ends up saving memory and helping to speed things up.  If you are having memory issues then it will either not convert at all or possibly even get the textures messed up upon conversion.  The latter is what it looks like you are getting and that points more towards buggy driver or a hardware issue.  In a perfect world the code could detect and handle this properly, but I'm not sure how to do that.


Edit: Oh and regarding OpenAL (to everyone in general), if you have an NVIDIA nForce motherboard then use the OpenAL drivers from NVIDIA and not Creative.  NVIDIA's OpenAL driver should be included in all nForce drivers and those are hardware accelerated.  The public Creative drivers are handled in software so they use more CPU power than the nForce drivers will.


Edit2:  Thinking about it more, there may be a bug with -img2dds in the D3D code.  I haven't checked this for sure but it was all a little freaky at one time and held up the final commit for weeks.  It's possible that there is still a bug there and I just didn't catch it during final testing.  I don't use D3D though (don't run Windows) so it's not something that I give a ton of testing like I do for OpenGL.  The problem could be related to Direct3D in general on your system or (more likely) a bug crept into the D3D -img2dds compression code.  I'll try an grab a good test system to try it out on this coming weekend and give it more testing.  For now you can just stay away from -img2dds or try using it with OpenGL instead.

[Kie99]

That subspace flash Explosion looks incredible.

[Cobra]

it looked pretty cool, didn't it?

Edit2: Thinking about it more, there may be a bug with -img2dds in the D3D code. I haven't checked this for sure but it was all a little freaky at one time and held up the final commit for weeks. It's possible that there is still a bug there and I just didn't catch it during final testing. I don't use D3D though (don't run Windows) so it's not something that I give a ton of testing like I do for OpenGL. The problem could be related to Direct3D in general on your system or (more likely) a bug crept into the D3D -img2dds compression code. I'll try an grab a good test system to try it out on this coming weekend and give it more testing. For now you can just stay away from -img2dds or try using it with OpenGL instead.

eh, about that, OpenGL doesn't run entirely stable with FSO for me, while it works with games that need at least a gig of system memory to run at full strength (and double my current video card RAM), and i can run that almost perfectly in OGL. i'll give it a shot later today though.

(and it was awesome to see uncompressed images. )

Cobra, I know you've posted them before, but what are your system specs? With the consistancy that you seem to be able to reproduce this effect, I'm wondering if img2dds isn't causing some funky collisions with what I am assuming is a less-than-optimal amount of system memory.

I'm barely able to play FSO:

Intel Celeron Processor (and a stock motherboard, so it's intel celeron motherboard, too)
2.7 GHz
256MB DDR RAM
64 MB on a GeForce MX4000

[StratComm]

Yeah, that system won't be able to handle the media VPs well at all.  From what taylor seems to think, it's probably not directly related, but you should probably be custom configuring the game to find a playable state that's somewhere below "high-end" on the graphics regardless of this bug.

[taylor]

eh, about that, OpenGL doesn't run entirely stable with FSO for me, while it works with games that need at least a gig of system memory to run at full strength (and double my current video card RAM), and i can run that almost perfectly in OGL. i'll give it a shot later today though.

The problem with D3D is that there is practically zero coder support for it right now.  The code is messy and has quite a few known memory leaks in it but unless Bobboau is available to do it then not much in the way of code changes get to D3D.  There is nothing wrong with sticking to D3D but just know that bug fixes aren't made very often and certainly not in a timely manner.

OpenGL gets full support from most everyone and especially me since it's all that's available on Linux and OS X.  You really don't have a good enough system to run with the MediaVPs but without those (mainly the high-end ones) it should run fine with OpenGL, unless there is some other problem.  I've gotten playable performance with all of the MediaVPs and hi-poly models on a 32meg video card in OpenGL so I know it's optimized decently well at this point.  I'll try and help deal with any OpenGL problems you might have as long as you are willing to test some things out.

[Cobra]

i'll. be. damned. OpenGL solved all of my problems!

i'll probably just have to take out mv_effects and i can get a decent FPS.

[karajorma]

The problem with D3D is that there is practically zero coder support for it right now.  The code is messy and has quite a few known memory leaks in it but unless Bobboau is available to do it then not much in the way of code changes get to D3D.  There is nothing wrong with sticking to D3D but just know that bug fixes aren't made very often and certainly not in a timely manner.

Anyone find it ironic that this is a complete reversal of the position we had about a year and a half ago?

[Cobra]

i ran out of memory when i played 2 missions.

[taylor]

i ran out of memory when i played 2 missions.

You should be able to use -img2dds again with OpenGL.  If it still doesn't work for you let me know.  Also, with the amount of memory that you have, you really don't want to use -cache_bitmaps since you'll tend to run out of memory during mission load (when playing multiple missions) with less than 512meg of system RAM.

[Cobra]

-img2dds has problems with OpenGL as well. see for yourself:

this is supposed to be a GTF Perseus.

[taylor]

-img2dds has problems with OpenGL as well. see for yourself:

Grrrr, thought I'd squashed that before -img2dds hit CVS.  I think it's some strange card/driver issue that the code doesn't properly deal with, but I'm not really sure.  I'll take another crack at it.  Do try the next CVS build just in case one of the things I changed tonight might help (doubt it but may get lucky).

[Cobra]

nope, still present in 20051215

[EDIT] I forgot to say, but i never experienced this problem until 20051129.