Vega Strike does not play nice with S3TC texture compression

[Miramor]

If you remember my thread in User Help, I had some memory consumption issues due to being unable to use texture compression. Well, it turns out my hardware (and, in fact, a large number of integrated graphics chipsets) can decompress textures that have been compressed in software.

I tried forcing S3TC compression... And discovered that it made VS look like this:



As opposed to this, without the compression:



I suspected a driver bug. However, when I tested BZFlag, which also uses textures, with forced S3TC, I got this...



As you can see, the textures are all pristine and beautiful. Ergo... the problem is with something that Vega Strike does. That's what it looks like anyway. I certainly hope this can be solved, because being unable to use texture compression makes the current SVN unplayable on cards that are supported fine...

[Miramor]

Still exists in latest SVN (11185). Can't figure out whether VS is seeing my hardware properly, as stderr and stdout are never generated.

(I should note, though, that in spite of the lack of texture compression the latest SVN has brought with it a freakin' massive reduction in memory usage. WTG, guys. )

[Miramor]

Ah here we go.

OpenGL::S3TC Texture Compression unsupported

This may actually be right, given what glxinfo has to say, even though i945GM is supposed to support S3TC. Maybe this is a driver bug.

(In which case, I wonder how on Earth BZFlag manages to look the same with S3TC forced when my card doesn't support it. )

Fortunately, the game is at least usable now without S3TC...

(Edit: or maybe it isn't. When I was SPECing towards Ataraxia barracks, VS suddenly seized up and the framerate dropped to less than 1/s.)

[loki1950]

Those semi freezes seem to be par ATM for us guys on low spec cpu's hopefully safemodes optimizations will get us there

Enjoy the Choice