Radeon HD vs UFO: AI - never ending story...

[ncpnc]

Hello there!
I'm playing with this game for about a month now, and I'm trying to stick as close is possible to 2.3 branch, so I recompile game myself almost every day with fresh sources
Unfortunately it seems that Raden HD series and this game doesn't like each other. I have seen a lot of graphical weirdness changing day after day until now, and they were always related to glsl and/or shadows:

- invisible earth on geoscape
- black textures
- glowing textures (like shaders on LSD
- shaders disappearing after bazooka hit
- game slowdown with glsl shaders enabled BUT no shaders visible on map (disabling shaders in options tripled FPS without any graphical difference)

And that's not all! Enabling multisampling always make game crash while still in the menu (I have to alt-tab to find some cryptic error mesagebox to find that game actually crash).
So I've just give a try to fresh sources (hey, 2.3 is without -dev, yay!) What I find is:

- still no shaders visible but big fps penalty when enabled
- trying to begin mission with crashed ufo ends with nothing (go back to geoscape)

Are those OpenGL drivers by ATI/AMD so much badly written?

Some system spec:
- Phenom X4 9850
- 4GB RAM
- dual HD4850 (CrossfireX)
- Windows Vista x64
- Ati catalyst 10.5 driver
- build: r30523
- game compile flags from make_UfoAI_win32.ini:

Code: [Select]

[ufo2map]
cores=15
clean=1
fast=4
mtune_ufo2map=amdfam10
Ox_ufo2map=O3
sse_ufo2map=sse4a
L1ls_ufo2map=L1-line=64
L1cs_ufo2map=L1-size=64
L2cs_ufo2map=L2-size=512
[ufoaisrc]
debug=4
default_UfoAI=4
mtune_UfoAI=amdfam10
Ox_UfoAI=O1
sse_UfoAI=sse4a
Can I do anything to help track those graphic issues?

[Mattn]

you should post your ufoconsole.log

[ncpnc]

Attached to my first post.

[arisian]

The issue with the failure to load the maps has nothing to do with your graphics card; if you look in the log, it says it can't find the proper tile to assemble the map.  Have you tried re-building the maps? 

The issue with models not being displayed properly is much more likely to be caused by the rendering code interacting with the ATI drivers; can you be more precise about what you're seeing there?  As usual, there's nothing in the logfile that indicates any sort of error.  If the only issue is that you can't easily see a difference, that may just be due to the fact that the changes are relatively subtle at the moment.  The most easily visible change is the soft-glow around the edges of emissive sources; for example, the bright green parts on the UFOs should appear to "glow" with GLSL and Postprocessing both enabled.

There's a much bigger visual difference in the renderer_work branch, but that code is nowhere near ready for prime-time yet; hopefully the 2.4 release will have pretty real-time shadows and lighting.

[Mattn]

that was an issue in oriental.ump - it's fixed with r30538 - feedback is welcome

[ncpnc]

OK then, check yourself. Fresh build: 30543.
All maps was cleaned and rebuilded yesterday.

Graphic configuration: http://img180.imageshack.us/img180/9801/ufo05.jpg

Visual effect (map +ufo_crash skirmish):
http://img688.imageshack.us/img688/1795/ufo03.jpg
http://img23.imageshack.us/img23/1272/ufo04.jpg

Shaders disabled, game restarted:
http://img295.imageshack.us/img295/6012/ufo06.jpg
http://img341.imageshack.us/img341/4217/ufo07.jpg

What's interesting, map failed to load at first time with shaders enabled, from ufoconsole.log:

Code: [Select]

2010/06/16 15:02:52 ==== InitGame ====
2010/06/16 15:02:56 ********************
2010/06/16 15:02:56 ERROR: SV_AddMapTiles: Impossible to assemble map 'ufocrash' with assembly 'craft_crash_harvester'

2010/06/16 15:02:56 ********************
2010/06/16 15:02:56 Shutdown server: Server crashed.
Second try and map loaded fine.

Update: If that matters - this release is first which doesn't crash efter enabling multisampling. No visual difference here hovewer

[arisian]

The glow effect on the rifles in your "ufo04.jpg" screenshot look correct to me.  The lack of glow on the UFO itself indicates to me that either you didn't have the effect enabled, or you're missing the glow-textures for the UFO somehow.

The failure to load maps still has nothing to do with the shaders; whether they're on or off should have no effect whatsoever.

[ncpnc]

The glow effect on the rifles in your "ufo04.jpg" screenshot look correct to me.  The lack of glow on the UFO itself indicates to me that either you didn't have the effect enabled, or you're missing the glow-textures for the UFO somehow.

I saw really cool effects of shiny metal surfaces and UFO glows with builds dated 2-3 weeks ago (or solid-black textures on models ). Now it's only what you see on screenshots, and shots were taken with GLSL and postprocessing ON. Graphic settings screenshot has been posted too. Like I also said, all maps were rebuilded yesterday. I don't know if bug is related to rendering vs drivers or maybe to map compilation, but as you can see, something is definitely wrong. Maybe some nvidia users could post screenshots to compare?

The failure to load maps still has nothing to do with the shaders; whether they're on or off should have no effect whatsoever.

Yes, probably another missing tile. According to SVN logs:

r3058: added missing tile definition for craft_crash_scout (oriental theme)
r3059: and another missing tile (craft_ufo_scout)

It seems that harvester is still missing and one of the UFO types is chosen randomly while loading map and that's why it worked at second time (loaded scout in place of harvester which failed)

[arisian]

The "shiny metal" stuff didn't make it into the 2.3 release; the only new graphical feature on the battlescape for 2.3 is the glow.  If the guns are glowing and the UFOs aren't I'm pretty sure it's due to missing files and not issues with the renderer.