Project Orbiter Galaxy

[ghostrunner01]

This post goes only to Apollo13 or anyone else that might have an NVidia G 80 card or better and having the black texture bug when using GPU generation!

In short, Artlav was surprised to find that the texture generator doesn't work on the GT220, he said they should be capable of running it (indeed, anything from G 80 upwards should), suggesting that there is something wrong besides the error handling.

He put together an **EXPERIMENTAL** fix that might solve the problem, might not solve the problem or might not work at all, especially on other graphics card (if you don't run an Nvidia card and don't have problems, don't even bother!).

I'd like to ask you to download the attached zip and put the swtexgen.dll into your orbiter root directory. It's a good idea to back up the old one, so you don't have to re-download the whole orbiter galaxy in case it doesn't work at all. Please tell me if this fix changes anything, for better or worse.

No go. Didn't work no difference. Exact same thing even after clearing out Cache, deleting saved systems, and exporting textures for Barnard's Star.

 

[Artlav]

No go. Didn't work no difference. Exact same thing even after clearing out Cache, deleting saved systems, and exporting textures for Barnard's Star.

Then i'm out of ideas for the moment.
I'll try to find an Nvidia card of the era to test on, but not earlier than mid-january.

 

[ghostrunner01]

Then i'm out of ideas for the moment.
I'll try to find an Nvidia card of the era to test on, but not earlier than mid-january.

I'll help test out any files if you want. I don't have any programming experience but I could test any updates on my pc if you want.

 

[Izack]

Please be more specific: does the window minimize and then nothing happens, or doesn't it even minimize?

Sorry for the late reply.

Bad reporting on my part. The window does absolutely nothing, i.e. pressing the button has no effect.
Pressing 'jmp' exits to the launchpad, where the !OGSwitch scenario is waiting for me and nothing else. With nothing else to do for testing I ran that scenario, which was when Orbiter crashed and generated a log file reporting a missing system/plant configuration file (not textures as I said previously, again poor bug reporting, sorry :facepalm
Relevant section of log:

>>> ERROR: While initialising celestial body:
>>> File not found: .\Config\OGalaxySystems/Barnard's Star/Barnard's Star g.cfg
>>> [CelestialBody::CelestialBody | .\Celbody.cpp | 48]
---------------------------------------------------------------
>>> TERMINATING <<<

 

[jedidia]

Interesting. Can you look into your Config/OGalaxySystems folder and see if there's a directory for Barnards star? and if there is, tell me what files are in there?

Also, have you tried another system, or have you tried deleting barnards star from your cache.txt and re-exporting?

That the scenario was created is a clear indication that something DID happen when you pressed the button, it just seems like there's a planet missing in the configs. Your best bet is to remove it from the cache file and try again.

 

[jedidia]

My connection is unexpectedly back while having its usual end-of-the-month near-death expierience, let's see if it stays long enough for me to post...

Of course, due to this little pecularity of my connection, I wasn't able to work on the chemtable after all, for the obvious reason that I don't have a university library at home... Not even a basic chemistry textbook, really. So I started tinkering around with the FTL system instead. Linguofreak, if you're reading this, dig out your dusty old tables, I might be able to make use of them soon

I also got myself a new graphics card for christmass, and ran full speed into the black texture bug. On an ATI, which is the first recorded so far, but I made good use of the occasion and tracked down the bug. Yes, I know now what's causing the trouble. I haven't fixed it yet, though, but you can rest assured that it WILL be terminated in the foreseeable future. After having learned what I learned, I actually wonder that there is any card that could run the thing.

In short, the bug was introduced when I forced the issue on that export status display (with a bit better error reporting, we might have found that out a lot sooner). Remember how I said that the texture generator derailed my drawing surface? Well, now that I violently capture it back to output the status, obviously the texture generator is frightened enough to give in... and gives its surface out of hand. It seems that the two are fighting a tug-of-war over for the same bloody context, and in the end there can be only one... I'll have to have a talk with Artlav to see if our two programms can be modified to peacefully coexist. If not, I'll have to kick out the status display again. After all, you'd rather have textures than the status, I assume...

(I know I do... wow, that new chip of mine is throwing them out for a dime a dozen! :jj

 

[Columbia42]

Which card did you get Jedidia? I'm in the market for one.

 

[jedidia]

ATI HD 5770, a mid-range card for current standards.

Generally, the thing most important for compatibility is the supported shader model. The texture generator should run on any card that supports SM 4.1 or higher, won't run on pre-1.0, and might or might not run in between, strongly depending on the drivers and the features of the respective cards. Get a card that supports higher shader models, and you'll be good for compatibility. Then the general rule of thumb is, the more it costs the faster it runs...

It looks like I found a solution for the black texture problem by switching irrlicht from OpenGL to directX. Will have to run a few more tests, but it looks like it might work... There's also a few other issues popping up which I didn't notice before because I could only export on CPU, I'd like to address them too before getting out a new patch.

 

[ghostrunner01]

Alright! I can't wait for the next patch! I'll be upgrading to a NVIDIA Geforce GTX 460 this summer so hopefully I want have problems with that!

 

[jedidia]

computers are weird...

switching irrlicht to DirectX leads to problems with... double-operations? wtf? I'm getting weird results for math operations now, most manifest in the random number generator, which happily outputs other numbers leading to a completely different galaxy (not too tough, since the restructurings in the code neccessary for 0.7 will change the whole thing anyways) and the names (cutting decimal points doesn't work anymore because 3584 divided by ten suddenly results in 358.3999999987aso). Less obvious but probably a lot more serious in a whole lot of mathematical operations that I guess produce slight errors now. And all just from switching from openGL to directX (which in irrlicht can be done by switching one line of code)??

what on earth is going on?

 

[Wishbone]

What pRNG are you using? Where do you keep the seed? Rounding functions (rint() etc.) are your friends.

 

[jedidia]

By now I reduced the whole thing to a minimum code example of a few lines and posted the problem on the irrlicht forum. There's no doubt that double operations get screwed up when running irrlicht on DirectX, because in said example I don't do anything else than initialising irrlicht and running my function for cutting of decimals. Let's see what the developers will say to the problem...

Although the whole thing is technically functional currently, status display and texture export working, I don't dare to put a patch up in this state. The errors are severe ( starting at the fifth place behind the period), and only god knows what that does to all the math going on inside orbiter galaxy...

 

[Artlav]

Maybe someone somewhere did a #define double float, for whatever crazy reason?
Could even be Microsoft-perpetrated, so as to keep some of their data types consistent.

 

[jedidia]

puh, got the bugger! Irrlicht has a creation parameter that tunes down double precision for directX devices by default, to improve performance (it seems that's a feature directX has and OpenGL not, but it's quite a useless feature for my purposes...). By overriding this default setting, the calculations work normal again.

I'll soon upload a new patch to resolve the black texture bug, but from what I observed so far it won't be without its flaws yet. There's still a few strange things going on in the texture generator, but resolving them will have to wait until Artlav gets back from vacation. No reason to not upload the patch as-is, although most will probably still have to export by CPU to get the full beauty of the textures.

---------- Post added at 08:08 PM ---------- Previous post was at 04:55 PM ----------

When i press at "Map" button in the interstellar-Nav-MFD i get CTD.

Do you get that CTD since you installed the patch? did previous versions work? does the standalone .exe file work?

 

[Axel]

The standalone file exe works, to previos versions i have no comparison because i installed it first time. But i see that the Orbitergalaxie-Config-directory is empty?!

 

[jedidia]

... have you installed Orbiter Galaxy or only the patch? to which directory did you install it?

 

[Linguofreak]

It looks like I found a solution for the black texture problem by switching irrlicht from OpenGL to directX.

Uh oh... That will probably break it for those of us in the Wine-on-Linux crowd, though DirectX is a smart solution for ATI cards (which, in my limited experience, are Really Crappy with OpenGL). Fortunately, being home from Europe, I do have access to our Windows/ATI desktop now. I maybe ought to get back to actually *using* Orbiter and Orbiter Galaxy instead of just talking on the forums about them. I could give you a nice two-platform testbed, between my laptop and our home desktop.

Would it be possible to have the selection of OpenGL/DirectX as an option for the user, or would that involve a huge amount of extra coding work on your part? If it wouldn't be too difficult, it might be the best solution, as certain platforms don't play well with OpenGL, and others don't play well/at all with DirectX.

 

[Axel]

I installed ofcourse both, the main install orbiter galaxy alpha 0.6 and the patch 0.6.1. I extracted both into the orbiter main directory.
If there is newer main version you should put a link to the addons description side.

 

[jedidia]

I installed ofcourse both, the main install orbiter galaxy alpha 0.6 and the patch 0.6.1. I extracted both into the orbiter main directory.
If there is newer main version you should put a link to the addons description side.

No, that should be alright... Anyone else getting a CTD with 0.6.1 when opening the map?? that would be... very disturbing. On the other hand, if you're the only one, I have no Idea what might be happening. You mentioned an empty config folder... is that the orbitergalaxy folder in your orbiter root directory? if so, then the install didn't copy all files.

Would it be possible to have the selection of OpenGL/DirectX as an option for the user, or would that involve a huge amount of extra coding work on your part? If it wouldn't be too difficult, it might be the best solution, as certain platforms don't play well with OpenGL, and others don't play well/at all with DirectX.

It is possible, but you wouldn't be able to export textures. The switch to DirectX happened because of conflicts between Artlavs texture generator and Orbiter Galaxy, after all...

I assumed that, since this is an orbiter add-on, you'd expect directX compatibility anyways, since Orbiter is directX, after all. Another thing would be if you want to use only the standalone app, but for astronomical purposes there are way better aplications out there, and I don't quite see what else you'd want to use it for.

Then again, there's the option of running it on OpenGL WITH texture export, but with the status display disabled... that would work. I can put that in as an option for the next patch!

By the way, do you still have your FTL tables around? I'm working on implementing the jumppoint system, I could some data (made up a quick dirty table myself, but with very unsatisfying results...).

 

[ghostrunner01]

The new patch you posted helped a lot, BUT I still get black textures on rock planets. The others work fine! I'm going to try some more stuff before I definitely say its still not fixed.

EDIT: WHOO! It worked!!! I set my options for CPU texture generation and it worked! All the textures look good! Now I can fully enjoy this awesome addon!