Inventive Dingo forums

So we were playing today and this happened.

Looks like the glitch is where the rifts should be (see attached map screenshot), which makes sense - each rift is supposed to be rendered to a texture. So in your case, the texture is getting corrupted, causing the effect you're seeing.

I'll move these posts to a separate bug thread.

Oh, I saw that one in single player once.  Also, I'd like to add that rifts are not showing for anyone other than the host in multiplayer games.  I think most of us know that laready though. (gives me an advantage since I've played most of the rift maps =D).

Yes, I know about that one. It'll be fixed in the next patch.

AH I beg to differ about rifts in MP...as I hosted a MP game with a friend with rifts and he never mentioned to me about rifts looking awkward at all...or any obscure graphix...

EDIT: my friend who I am trying to double check with on this...is having sum memory issues so I am currently playing another MP with him...to just check...

---Stixsmaster

Stix, the one with the strange display is not exlcusive to multiplayer and only occurs some of the time.  From my expierence, I have never seen a rift in a multiplayer game that I did not host.

Yes, the display of rifts to remote clients is definitely broken. (Except on my development copy, where it's fixed now.) This rift rendering glitch is a separate issue.

It was late when I posted the OP, so I forgot to mention that it was persistent too. It was like that one game and then every game afterwards. Don't know if that helps or not.

I don't have a screenshot (its extremely hard for me to take them ingame)  But it seems that if a rift is long enough, the thickness increases, and resolution decreases.  I'm dealing with rifts that range over a distance of around 2000-10000 pixels on the current map I'm working on.  It seems pretty consistent if anyone wants to replicate it.  I'm not sure if its dependent on the total rift distance, or the distance between two ajacent points on the rift.

That's the game trying to fit the rift on an axis-aligned texture without using large amounts of graphics memory. :)

The workaround is to split long rifts into multiple shorter ones.

"Dark Nebula" What about an invisible rift called "Dark Nebula" to not use heavy grafics?
Fabio

Rifts aren't much of a performance problem really, I just need to fix them up. :)  I might need to get an OpenGL expert in to look at the code since I confess I don't quite understand the details of the render-to-texture API calls. No doubt this is why they sometimes don't render correctly.

*Puts openGL on my list of stuff to learn right after QT and just about every other method of making something other than text appear on the screen*
So yeah... I'll be an expert in about 10 years, is that a good timeframe for ya?

That depends. Will they have a time machine in 2019? ;D

I don't know, maybe I can put that on the bottom of the list to finish by 2029?

But then I'd have to wait another 10 years before you came back in time to help me!

...Hang on, that's not right is it?

On a more serious note: Did I already get a dxdiag.txt from you, Minus? If not, could you do Start->Run->dxdiag->"Save all information" and email dxdiag.txt to me? Thanks!

Don't hold your breath.  Uh, I guess I'll send you the dxdiag.  Its basically a memory dump right?

More like a technical specifications dump. Operating system, graphics card, versions of drivers, that kind of thing.

Received, thanks! ...Urgh... Vista with a laptop graphics card. I should have known. ;)

I'd still like one from Minus, if he's around.

Sorry, I've been getting my internet fix from my ipod for the last couple of days. I'll see what I can do tonight.

At least its not integrated!  I'm planning on swtiching over to linux in a couple of months (dual boot from CD).  Vista is just crap for CS classes.  It took me 3 or more hours to install QT, it took my professor 8 minutes on his mac...

Happened again today. Looks like I'm still the only one with this problem. Probably just my machine. :-[

minus, you warn't the only one, I've gotten that in single player before. Its just very rare, and inconsistent.  I wonder if it has to do with the planets overlapping the rift?  I've only seen it happen on quadrants 2.

So this is an intermittent bug, I take it? You've both had rifts display correctly before? On the same maps as when it sometimes doesn't work?

Yes, exactly.  I don't know if its appeared on any maps other than quadrants 2.

Correct, I have only ever seen this a total of two times now.

Hmm. You weren't task-switching while the map was loading at all, were you?

It's possible. I'll test it later.

Thanks!

Its possible that I was task swtiching.  Out of curiosity, what difference would that make on how the game loads?

Normally nothing, but on some computers I have seen a task-switch cause bits of graphics memory to be overwritten. Meanwhile the rift textures are being rendered to the back buffer and copied off into textures (this is done during the map loading process). If the back buffer gets messed with while you're doing that, odd things can happen.

I haven't seen the exact effect as is being reported here - when I saw it, it was bits of the desktop and other windows showing up on the rift textures - but it does sound similar, especially as it's intermittent.

Other parts of the loading process should not be affected by task-switching - and aren't, as far as I know.