Black Models on ATI Radeon Cards - Rev 30167

[arisian]

There were a few "optimizations" that I took out in places where I think they may have been skipping some cases that should have been handled.  Making them handle everything was the easiest way to fix it for the release, even if it's not the most optimal way to do so.

Alternatively, if you've never actually used postprocessing before, that would explain it, since postprocessing in the current implementation is known to be very expensive in terms of framerate.  I'm not quite sure why it's so slow, to be honest; it's something I'll try to fix if I can ever figure out what's causing it.

[Aesten]

I actually can't quite recall if I was doing post-processing off, or if it was realtime-lighting i ticked off to fix the shiny model bug on ATi.  Another potentiality is my computer and graphics card aren't exactly top of the line... I built this for about 500$ a year and a half ago. Core 2 Duo 5200 (2.5ghz) and a Radeon 4650. In a day or two I'll get around to installing on my laptop. Much higher specs Core i7, Mobility 5870 etc.
Actually might be able to run faster if it wasn't running in windowed mode, even if said resolution isn't screen max. I multitask a lot, and my mouse basically won't release once I've alt-tabbed.
Anyway, aside from the slowness(which I can manage with), the game looks awesome to me. And definitely brings back the good ol X-Com memories!

[Edi]

Was this problem supposed to be fixed in trunk? I'm still experiencing it with the öatest 2.4 dev builds, no change.

[arisian]

No, it should be fixed in the 2.3 branch, but I haven't fixed it in trunk yet.

[Edi]

No, it should be fixed in the 2.3 branch, but I haven't fixed it in trunk yet.

Thanks for the informative comment on the bug tracker. Much appreciated.

My personal workaround for this is to map F5 and F6 to turn real time lighting off and on at a stroke. I like the GLSL eyecandy on the geoscape far too much to part with it and real time lighting does not require a restart when turned back on. Enter battlescape, press F5 and ta-daa, no more black models. Come back to geoscape, press F6 and you have eyecandy back. The required code for keys.cfg is

Code: [Select]

bind F5 "set r_lights 0;"
bind F6 "set r_lights 1;"

[MCR]

Still no realtime lighting on ATI-gfx-cards, although my ATI-card's driver claims it is fully OpenGL 4.0 compatible 

Are there any news on that front ?

I saw you made a big update for the renderer_work branch, Arisian ! 

I wanted to try this branch, but unfortunately I was not able to compile any of the verions with codeblocks yet (errors out), but I was also wondering if maybe there are some fixes already made in that branch, which you could merge into trunk ?!?

Is there a way to get some screenshots of the renderer_work branch @ least ?! Or is it a secret until finished ? Give us some updates !!!

Greetinx.

[arisian]

The work I'm doing in the branch is a pretty major overhaul; there's no easy way to integrate just part of it into trunk.  I don't use codeblocks myself, so I haven't been keeping the project files up to date; they probably need to have some of the new source files added to them (eg. new .c and .h files in src/renderer/).  In term's of screenshots, here's one now.  Keep in mind, this is a "manufactured" screenshot, in that I've just arbitrarily created some lights in order to show off the shadows.  One is blue-ish and the other more orange so you can tell which shadows are being cast by which lightsource; lights in the actual game can be whatever color we want, though white (or close) is more realistic for most types of lightsource.

No lightmaps were used in this scene; in fact, I expect that the lightmaps will be removed alltogether by the time I'm done.  In the mean time, keep in mind that this is still very much a work-in-progress; the renderer-work branch isn't really intended to be a viable alternative to trunk for gameplay or testing at the moment.

[MCR]

YEAH !!!

You are our OpenGL wizard 4 sure !!!

A triple 

& thanx for the hint with the codeblocks project file, I had no look @ that, it was just some quick testing...

Is it a big amount of work for you to try to fix the codeblocks project file ?!

My Linux OS is unavailable for me @ the moment, because everything is set up for high-res compiz-beryl-fusion gfx there, but my TFT has given up @ the moment & I do not want to rebuild my whole configuration...

Also fglrx in version 10.6 has brought lots of speed improvements, but still it is ATI  & you know how nice their drivers are, under Linux even more fX!!%!§...

But I have a GTX260 winxp machine waiting for a test of some real-time shadows & would be very happy to turn it on, whenever you are ready to give us a chance to test this...