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A home for tales of personal killcounts and engagements between vast armadas, as well as the odd recounting of that time you saw an alien capship taking out a mining base while trying to parallel park.
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omegakent
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Back here!

Post by omegakent »

Finally, I'm back. I'm sorry I went away, my computer was too slow, I bought a new one, first time in VS with extreme detail, unlimited textures, etc... it crashed, but after downgrading to 2048 textures and high detail all is going good.
Oh!! I forgot my location, my current ship, almost everything. And then, I found me: Jupiter. WITH A MULE. Current position: 4.5 km over the surface. It was 01h when I logged in... I remember I tried about 3 times to get out of the gravitational field of Jupiter, before long abscense.
And finally, I did it. Expending almost half my fuel, it took me 40 minutes to get FTL speed. I wanted to go to Fighter Barracks, any of them. But, with my 43000 speed (due to getting out of Jupiter), trying to get into any FB could have been another nightmare, if not a crash. So then, I set course to whatever moon/asteroid not far of my direction vector: the one having the lowest angular distance was Ceres. Well, it took me another 40 minutes to dock there. And enormous circles under my eyes.
So then, first action: switch to my old Derivative. And a learned lesson: never, NEVER EVER, get any close to any gaseous giant. When I get a Clydesdale, I won't get close even to asteroids or moons. Too, tooooooooooo looooooooooooooong time.
Oh! Another lesson: all that time trying to getting out of Jupiter, I spent training my turret beams. So, if any pirate gets close, he won't know how did he lose his ship. And if any luddite gets into my sensors, he will know the very actual meaning of torture.
"Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent." Salvor Hardin in Foundation, by Isaac Asimov. New York, 1943.
klauss
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Re: Back here!

Post by klauss »

omegakent wrote:Finally, I'm back. I'm sorry I went away, my computer was too slow, I bought a new one, first time in VS with extreme detail, unlimited textures, etc... it crashed, but after downgrading to 2048 textures and high detail all is going good.
Which GPU? That usually means you don't have enough VRAM to hold all the textures. Planets, especially, requires HUGE amounts of VRAM because of the immensely detailed textures they have now. Which is good for visuals, but also a great strain on the GPU.
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Re: Back here!

Post by TBeholder »

<cough> /hqtextures <cough>
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omegakent
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Post by omegakent »

Current system: Intel Core i3-3220 CPU 3.30 GHz Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-H61M-DS2 (Rev. 3.0). 3.2 GB RAM (running on Win XP 32 bits). No external video card.
It could help if reference system is given for each type of Vega Strike setup.
Now, I'm going for a ride... It seems a pirates wing is wrecking havoc in Telamon. The hunt will give me 350k.
Oh! I really love my Derivate Milspec!
"Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent." Salvor Hardin in Foundation, by Isaac Asimov. New York, 1943.
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Post by omegakent »

Weird thing... Now, if I switch to a lower quality configuration, VS crashes in the loading stage.
Well, I expected problems, as I don't have a clean installation for the new system.
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Post by klauss »

omegakent wrote:Current system: Intel Core i3-3220 CPU 3.30 GHz Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-H61M-DS2 (Rev. 3.0). 3.2 GB RAM (running on Win XP 32 bits). No external video card.
It could help if reference system is given for each type of Vega Strike setup.
Now, I'm going for a ride... It seems a pirates wing is wrecking havoc in Telamon. The hunt will give me 350k.
Oh! I really love my Derivate Milspec!
Ah, yes. Onboard Intel GPUs, while they run decently, they don't support S3TC texture compression, which means textures use up 4 or 5 times more RAM. That quickly exhausts the allocated VRAM and crashes. I've seen that on my own laptop. You have to limit yourself to 1k textures, or you'll see random crashes.
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Call me "Menes, lord of Cats"
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log0

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Post by log0 »

Intel HD series support S3TC afaik. What I found out just recently while messing with some texture loading code is that older Intel GPUs also support FXT1 (internally) :O

When asking to use compressed internal format, the driver of my old gm45 will compress them to fxt1, crazy shit...

Not sure if vegastrike forcing compression though.
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Post by log0 »

Btw. I'd like to make a proposal:

Any user running into crashes, should use apitrace: http://apitrace.github.io

It is stupid simple to use, is available on linux/windows and allows retracing with error checks.
1. Download/unpack http://people.freedesktop.org/~jrfonseca/apitrace apitrace-msvc-latest.7z
2. Copy apitrace\x86\lib\wrappers\opengl32.dll into game folder
3. Run game, vegastrike.trace wil be created
4. Start apitrace\x86\bin\qapitrace.exe (retrace gui)
5. File/Open vegastrike.trace and run Trace/Replay
6. Look for any errors in the log
7. When finished remove opengl32.dll
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Post by klauss »

log0 wrote:Intel HD series support S3TC afaik.
LOL, not all.. that's what they want you to think, but they state it very unclearly somewhere (can't find it now) that they support S3TC decompression (meaning the driver decompresses them so the app thinks it's S3TC but not).

The ones that do support it, they don't in linux, since MESA in general has quite spotty support for it.

Maybe in a very very very up-to-date system, maybe it'd work. I've had no such system.
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omegakent
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Re: Back here!

Post by omegakent »

Well, I'm locked in 1k textures, "highest" detail everything. Can't go higher, as VS crashes. And the weird thing: I can't even go LOWER, as VS won't load at all.
Well, I'll have to make a tour for a decent video card. Suggestions? I'm looking for something not very high-end, but for a reliable video card.
"Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent." Salvor Hardin in Foundation, by Isaac Asimov. New York, 1943.
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Post by log0 »

klauss wrote:
log0 wrote:Intel HD series support S3TC afaik.
LOL, not all.. that's what they want you to think, but they state it very unclearly somewhere (can't find it now) that they support S3TC decompression (meaning the driver decompresses them so the app thinks it's S3TC but not).

The ones that do support it, they don't in linux, since MESA in general has quite spotty support for it.

Maybe in a very very very up-to-date system, maybe it'd work. I've had no such system.
Right. The second gen HD series HD 2000-5000 it is. No idea about the older ones. (but then even my gm45 can compress stuff if I force it, with this FXT1, which has only been supported by intel and 3dfx, lol) Maybe I should try to see if I can get vegastrike to use it on that chip.

As for Linux/Mesa, you will need libtxc-dxtn for compression, but feeding the driver with compressed textures should work even without I think.

Sorry for getting off topic with this...
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Post by log0 »

omegakent wrote:Well, I'm locked in 1k textures, "highest" detail everything. Can't go higher, as VS crashes. And the weird thing: I can't even go LOWER, as VS won't load at all.
Well, I'll have to make a tour for a decent video card. Suggestions? I'm looking for something not very high-end, but for a reliable video card.
For AMD a budget card would be something like HD7750 < 100$
A gamer card would be HD7850 (almost PS4 perf) > 150$
You might get away cheaper by opting for older cards HD6770 or so, if you can get a cheap one.
If you plan to run linux, I'd recommend Nvidia cards though.

Tbh I think VS should run on the Intel GPU you have got, not at max settings, but still...
Could you try to run apitrace?
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Post by klauss »

log0 wrote:Tbh I think VS should run on the Intel GPU you have got, not at max settings, but still...
Could you try to run apitrace?
I've been running VS on my i5 for a long while, and it works quite decently.

However, for shader development, I had no choice than to get me an nVidia, mostly because those can always handle whatever shader you throw at them (both Intel and AMD are picky).

I'm developing on an GF8200. It's not fast. By a long shot. But it works. Something on the lines of the 8600 would probably work fine, but it's an oldie. I've been meaning to get my hands on an GTX 460, or whatever equivalent there is nowadays (I'd gamble the 660, but it's not always so easy). That's a very very good GPU, and in the affordable range (~200).
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Post by log0 »

klauss wrote:However, for shader development, I had no choice than to get me an nVidia, mostly because those can always handle whatever shader you throw at them (both Intel and AMD are picky).
Comically, this pickiness is due to ATI and Intel being more strict to the OpenGL spec from my experience. nVidia are like the IE of graphics. You can write all kinds of weird stuff and it will run, while breaking on other hardware.

Lately I've been checking my shaders with Mesa/GLSL compiler. They seem to have the most pedantic implementation, have to implement workarounds for buggy applications, lol.
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Post by klauss »

I would tend to agree, and in fact that's precisely why i still keep my lappy in intel mode even though it also has an nVidia gtx 3something: because it's great to validate compatibility.
But when writing new shaders, that's a big pain. And not only that: I've also found tons of bugs on the compiler. Not every time it breaks it's my fault... and having to debug a compiler in addition to the shader is no fun.
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Call me "Menes, lord of Cats"
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