no text / invisible font [SVN 7768 + 7781] - solved

[Bh'Og]

Just downloaded and installed 7768 to give it a try, but was stopped from playing at the very first window, as either there was no text on the buttons, or the font was invisible ... .

Ran 0.4.4-7641 for 240 turns in the last days without any troubles, though.



Update: Problem solves - updating the AMD/ATI drivers to Catalyst 14.4 did the trick !

[Mitten.O]

What Operating System are you on? Can you find freeorion.log and see if there are error messages there? Also, if the buttons and the cursor are still visible, try clicking the fourth button from the top. That should be the load game screen, which contains coloured text, see if it is visible.

[Bh'Og]

I'm still running XP Pro ...

Looks like this possibly was a false alarm, or at least a wrongly worded bug report:

As I mentioned, I ran 0.4.4 before I tested [7768]
Then I deinstalled 0.4.4 - but it seems this didn't delete settings, savegames and whateverelse, although it did delete the game folder.
At least, after re-installing 0.4.4, I still have the old settings and savegames avalaible again.

So I guess I tried to run [7768] with some settings files from 0.4.4, which possibly is the cause of the troubles.

On the other hand, deinstalling the game should do exactly that - deinstall everything, unless there's a prompt if I want to chose otherwise, which there isn't.

Leaves the question - how do I get a "clean" install for testing [7768]?

[MatGB]

Theoretically, if you install a different version then the old config (settings) file is ignored and you get default settings (but still have access to old savegames). If that's not working then there's a bug.

You can clean install into a different folder, but on Windows it'll still go to your default Users directory for savegames and similar, but unless that is a bug above then that shouldn't matter. 90% of the time you can simply install one game over another but sometimes deleting the install directories after running uninstall is necessary.

On the other hand, the test version does have a lot of new rendering stuff that some older machines may have problems with in terms of graphics driver compatibility, that side of things I can't help with

[Geoff the Medio]

...deinstalling the game should do exactly that - deinstall everything, unless there's a prompt if I want to chose otherwise, which there isn't.

It's not that simple. Save games and settings are stored in a FreeOrion directory in the user directory. The user could have put other files there, so it's not safe to force-delete. There might also be multiple copies of FreeOrion installed, in which case one wouldn't want to delete the other install's config or save files. I'm also unsure if an installer would even have access / rights to delete random files / directories in the user directory.

[Bh'Og]

What Operating System are you on? Can you find freeorion.log and see if there are error messages there? Also, if the buttons and the cursor are still visible, try clicking the fourth button from the top. That should be the load game screen, which contains coloured text, see if it is visible.

XP Prof SP3
Load game screen didn't have any text either ...
Log files attached.

S.

[Bh'Og]

Tried SVN 7781 - same sad picture ...

[Dilvish]

Also, if the buttons and the cursor are still visible, try clicking the fourth button from the top. That should be the load game screen, which contains coloured text, see if it is visible.

Load game screen didn't have any text either ...

Hmm, so you could see icons, etc., just not text? To help us understand better, please post a screenshot.

Also, could you check whether r7755 works for you and also whether r7757 works for you? If you test 7757 right after 7755 you should be able to just use the zipped set of executables/libraries to replace the relevant files rather than doing a full reinstall. There was a significant change to text rendering in between these two versions is why I'm flagging them to you, it could help us home in on your problem.

[Bh'Og]

... you're right, 7757 turned the game (at least for me) into this:

[Bh'Og]

Updating drivers to "Ati/AMD 14-4-xp32-64-dd-ccc-pack1" did the trick - 7781 looks fine again ... at first, at least.

Sadly, I'm getting some strange graphical artifacts - tried tweaking the graphic driver settings, but it didn't do anything ...
(actually, getting the asteroid distortions to show wasn't that easy, as the first 5 screenshots didn't show anything unusual, until I used Irfanviews screen copy feature ...)

[Vezzra]

Sadly, I'm getting some strange graphical artifacts

Just to be sure: these artifacts only appear with r7757 and later, r7755 is ok?

@Mitten.O: These issues seem to be related to your VBO patch, any idea what might go wrong here?

[Bh'Og]

Sadly, now not only the test versions, but even [0.4.4-7641] is broken ... fleet icons and asteroids are the "smaller" problems with all versions:

[Vezzra]

Sadly, now not only the test versions, but even [0.4.4-7641] is broken ... fleet icons and asteroids are the "smaller" problems with all versions:

But r7641 used to work for you, didn't it? Meaning, the graphic card driver update actually made things worse...?

[Mitten.O]

@Mitten.O: These issues seem to be related to your VBO patch, any idea what might go wrong here?

Not really. My OpenGL-fu is still fairly shallow. I can debug problems when I see them, but speculating on them remotely is harder. With sufficient data I may be able to figure something out (read: come up with a good wording for a google search).

These issues seem to occurs on radeons. I do have access to a computer that has a radeon card, but it is running linux, so my hopes of reproducing these there aren't high. Well, at least driver updates seem to fix the problem for most. That in itself is a bit weird, though, since it is using OpenGL 2.0 techniques, which are legacy stuff. Maybe they just are so legacy that they had bit rotted and got fixed. Not that it isn't possible that I am doing something subtly wrong.

Oh, a new post from Bh'Oh. Affects 0.4.4! This isn't the fault of the VBO patch, then. But since the VBO requires updated drivers, it is worrying that updating drivers made this appear.

I don't have time to poke at this right now, but I'll brainstorm a bit. Hmm... ok that looks like corrupted data. Mostly contained inside a specific window. Windows don't have their own textures or anything, so the corruption is probably occurring while clipping is active for it to care about window boundaries. So my guess is drawing something inside the side panel goes wrong, tries to mess up everything, but clipping is on, so the destruction is limited. On the other hand, not the entire side panel is covered, so maybe the corruption just has some inherent bounds. It seems unlikely for them to just happen to follow the left edge of the window, though.

As for what may be going wrong, the earlier artifacts were related to (or at least close to) rendering textures (the fleet icon and the asteroid cycle. The cycle is an animation rendered with a texture, right?), so I would suspect the picture of the star is the culprit. But other textures, like the icons, seem fine. Hmm... How does the mess change over time? Is it constantly different? How does it react to your actions (just moving the mouse on it, using the scrollbar, hovering over positions that should launch a tooltip, resizing)?

What driver settings did you mess with? If this has to do with texture rendering, mipmapping, filtering and other texture related settings may be most effective. (Even if they don't fix it, a clear, repeatable effect may give some insight into what is going on.)

[Bh'Og]

Yes, the new driver made actually made things worse, as I was able to play 0.4.4 without any troubles with the old driver.

More testing on [0.4.4-7641]:

1. After doing a quickstart, everything seems ok.
2. Corrupted graphics appear if I click on "unknown system", or a system with asteroids, or a fleet icon on the main map or hover the mouse over some icons (buildings, fleet stance).
3. Once corrupted, the graphic stays the same - only asteroids are "blinking", as they are animated, and every 2nd or 3rd frame or so seems to get through ok.
4. Fleet list: mouseover on the damage icon works, fleet stance icons get corrupted with the first mouseover (and in the popup window); Also, all "hide" icons (e.g.) look the same, even the one in the popup window (same corruption regardless of size, and at once). Strangely, the icon appears ok again as long as it is under the mouse pointer, and then only that single one.
5. same for planetary buildings - only "orbital drydock" seems to be immune.
6. planetary specials icons seem to be immune, either
7. resigning and starting a new game does not alter the appearance of the corrupted icons; completely restarting the programdoes give different "results" (appearance) each time; most times, icons are corrupted, a small number of them disappear on first click/mouseover, but not always the same, though

Testing on driver settings:
nothing seems to have an effect, but I suspect that all the those settings are DirectX only. There's only one setting that says "openGl", and that is triple buffering, that does nothing.