High rez runaways problem

[Silverbolt]

OK, can somebody help me?

i have no idea of what is happening

[GreyCap]

Umm... repaved during repairs?

[FastCargo]

I've seen this happen when the computer system is getting stressed. My suspicion is that TK's sim detects when it's getting close to running out of video memory when loading and starts loading lower res textures or no textures.

 

FC

[column5]

Seen it too in NF but could never find the source of the problem.

[Silverbolt]

I've seen this happen when the computer system is getting stressed. My suspicion is that TK's sim detects when it's getting close to running out of video memory when loading and starts loading lower res textures or no textures.

 

FC

 

can be, my videocard isn't the best one but it didn't happen in my DS install

 

 

@C5: yeah, i'm using it with NF

[+Stary]

(...) starts loading lower res textures or no textures.

 

FC

 

Could be the reason. Playing SFG on my previous, few years old system, I had sometimes white, textureless LODs on some of the more memory hungry planes. They were loading without textures, but not causing CTD or hangup, still acceptable framerate. TK may be smartest dev around

[+331Killerbee]

Yep, FC is right. I remember asking TK about this a couple of Years ago when I was putting together the first Version of OTC..........The Engine does it. But for the life of Me, I can't recall which .Dll he said does it......The Engine detects how much Memory Your Vid card has and will Bench Mark off of that. Besides, You ever wonder how the Game detects what Vid Card You have in the Options Screen?

 

331KB

[Gunrunner]

KB> It gets it through Windows/DirectX... nothing really special here.

 

Also, regarding textures the "strategy" seems to be :

- Try to load the texture outside the CAT

- If the texture is missing or too heavy to load, try to load the texture inside the CAT

- If the texture is missing or too heavy to load, use no texture

 

A cunning plan might be to add intermediate steps where the engine uses a degraded texture derived from what it finds too heavy.

The code is partially there, as it is used for the various texture settings, however, it is probably targeted to be subtype-wide (all textures of a given subtype get degraded) and lacks the necessary logic to be used only for specific textures.

 

Interestingly there seems to be no evident logic in the loading of textures to optimise this strategy, making sure the most important objects get the better textures and only the rest get degraded.

 

On a related note, the texture-loading optimisation features sometime have strange effects; for instance, have you ever tried flying TMF F-16A-1 with TMF F-16A-10 as a wingman (both using the default USAF texture) ?

You'll notice that your wingman inherits the black nose even though it should use the grey one, weirder even, you'll notice that while the tail of your wingman starts with the proper red band, the band on the moving part is the blue one of the F-16A-1 texture.

Try it the other way round and you'll see the F-16A-1 "inheriting" parts of the F-16A-10 textures...

What I can't remember though is if the problem is limited only to your flight or is inherited by all TMF F-16s throughout the game (and it's not TMF's fault, it's clearly an engine "feature", although the fact that the texture folders and filenames are identical triggers this behaviour (renaming one of the folders solving the problem)).

It probably comes from an optimisation to avoid loading the same texture twice, except in that case it doesn't seem to be quite clever at discriminating what should be loaded twice or not.

Edited March 23, 2009 by Gunrunner

[+331Killerbee]

KB> It gets it through Windows/DirectX... nothing really special here.

 

DX.....True. But there's is a thing called GraphicsEngine.dll in the Systems Folder.......(Now I remember)

 

BTW....Open it with a Hex Editor and see what Ya' got.