VectorStorm Blog

So after pushing out all those bug fixes yesterday, I decided to take a day away from the MT2 codebase, before starting on work toward MS2.

…and it didn’t really work out.  I ended up spending much of this “day off” playing with MT2′s shaders, just for fun.  As part of that, I found the causes of the weird visuals on grass on ATI cards (my own fault;  I had actually already fixed it on my ATI machine, and then forgot to commit the fix so that it’d be included as part of the 1.04 build)  I also found that for some reason which I don’t currently understand, the floaters (the red numbers that appear when you place buildings) are causing really strange fog effects on ATI cards.  I’m completely baffled by this, so I just disabled those floaters for now.  They weren’t giving any useful information in the MS1 build anyway;  I can figure out what’s going wrong with them later on.

While I was playing with shaders, I also switched to a nicer fog implementation.  Higher quality, fixes some other fog glitches on ATI cards, and actually runs a lot faster, too.

No other changes in this build.  So unless you’re running on an ATI card, it’s probably not worth bothering with the update.  But you ATI users, this one’s for you.  It’s MS1.05:

• Win32 build.

No OS X build for this version, since ATI on OS X wasn’t experiencing the rendering glitches in MS1.04.

As usual, if you give this a run on an ATI card, please let me know how it works out for you;  whether the graphic glitches from previous builds are actually fixed now, or whether there are still some left.  Thanks, guys!

I believe that this fixes all reported bugs from the previous two posts.  If I’ve missed a bug you reported (or if you run into a new one), please let me know!

Folks with ATI cards, please post and let me know whether this updated build works for you, and if so, whether you get any strange graphical glitches!  I’m getting a few on my ATI card, but it’s an ancient one with slightly dodgy drivers.  I’m really interested to know whether those glitches are also there with the latest and greatest.  :)

Apparently, most (all?) recent ATI cards’ OpenGL drivers have a bug where if a program specifies that it requires a hardware-accelerated OpenGL context, then ATI gives you the default software-implemented Microsoft GDI-based OpenGL v1.1 renderer, instead.

On the other hand, if you don’t tell it that you need an accelerated context, then it will give you an accelerated context, and have support for shaders and other fancy things.  Yay.

Anyhow, this issue seems to actually be affecting an awful lot of OpenGL programs.  And it’s been around since the ATI Catalyst drivers v8.1.  But it’s not much reported online, oddly.  It’s taken three days of google searches for me to find it!

So with that fairly simple change, I now have my my ATI card working again.  So I’m now working to get a yet-again-updated MMORPG Tycoon 2 build up and running.  I’m not expecting to get it going tonight;  tomorrow is more likely.  But I’ll post updates as soon as there’s further news.

Thanks everyone for the bug reports you’ve made;  I think I’ve now got enough to keep me busy for this next build!  And I’ll get some sort of proper bug reporting system set up somewhere, so that bug reports don’t easily get forgotten about the way that they do when they’re posted as comments.

UPDATE (Updated again!): I’ve now fixed most of the ATI-only glitches in the VectorStorm library.  Here are the remaining ATI-specific issues that I need to tackle before releasing an updated build of MS1:

1. Everything in the game which has a texture on it is acting as though the texture is solid, opaque white.(Now fixed)
2. Whenever I try to compile an OpenGL display list which uses VBOs and which render using a texture, the game crashes.  If I draw the geometry using arrays instead of VBOs, then things work correctly (apart from the texture appearing as solid white).  (Now fixed — fixing the textures appears to have fixed this as well!)
3. None of my shaders seem to be working.  Bloom, lighting, etc.  If I go to older VectorStorm projects and fix them to get hardware acceleration on ATI cards, they still don’t seem to actually render anything that uses shaders.. (I’ve finally gotten the shaders working on ATI cards, except that the bloom shader is only working when my lighting shaders are enabled. To be honest, I’m not sure how the bloom effect can be working at all without my lighting shaders enabled, when running on non-ATI, non-Win32. Maybe it’s not. Must double-check Mac and NVidia builds!)

Finally got the ATI build working acceptably well! I want to make a few more non-ATI-specific bugfixes, and will upload a new build tomorrow.

Just a quick note;  I found the reason why starting points weren’t able to be placed in the Win32 build, and have uploaded a fix.  The OS X build was not affected.  (ed:  There’s now a newer build.  Links to the old build removed)

Here’s a link to the updated Win32 build.

And for Mac users, that version is still here.

I’m especially interested to hear from any Win32 folks who have ATI video cards — does this work for you?  We’ve only had one ATI user speak up so far, and he was having trouble..

Update:  I’m definitely not successfully starting up ATI’s OpenGL drivers.  I can’t imagine how it would be failing, but it definitely is.  I do have a repeatable test case here, and so hopefully it won’t take too terribly long to get a build that will render successfully on ATI cards.

First, a request.  If you grab the Win32 build, please leave a comment on this post about whether or not it runs for you.  As I’ve mentioned in earlier posts, I’ve made a lot of last-minute changes to my build environment, and finally ended up making the build on a Mac, running a Win32 compiler under emulation.

So I’d really like to hear definitively whether or not it runs on a real Windows box, and how well it runs.  If you could give your computer’s specs, including video card, that’d be greatly appreciated!  :)

If it fails to run on your computer under Win32, I’d be really grateful if you could send me the ‘stdio.txt’ file that the game creates, just to help me debug what’s gone wrong for you.  You can e-mail it to me at “trevor (at) vectorstorm (dot) org”.  Thanks!

• Win32 Build (updated — see post above)
• OS X Build (updated — see post above)

Instructions:

In general, just play around, see what works and what doesn’t.  Remember that this is not, currently, a “game”;  it’s really more of a tech demo, I’m putting it out there to see how well it runs for people in the real world.  Note that it might take a fair while to start up, when you first run it;  it’ll sit there with an empty window until it finishes generating the world.

Controls:

Left-click on buttons.  Many buttons have tooltips to tell you what they do.  Others have text labels.  Others do nothing whatsoever.

Right-click and drag to turn.  WASD to move.  Space and alt/option to go up and down, when flying a graveship.

Non-obvious stuff: The money system is half-disabled.  You won’t run out of cash, though, no matter how much you do.  (it’s being continuously replenished).

When constructing buildings, you need to build a graveyard first.  Your AI developers can’t get into the world to activate things until you’ve built that graveyard.  So when you’re wondering why you can’t place an Inn, it’s because you haven’t placed a graveyard.  Buttons don’t currently have an “inactive” state to show that they can’t be used;  that’s something I really, really need to add soon.

Finally, note that while you can fly past the region borders, the regions are not yet actually connected to each other.  That is, a graveyard in one region won’t let you build buildings in another graveyard, and subscribers will not travel from one to another.

Feel free to ask other questions, if I’ve forgotten to mention something important.  I’m pretty tired at this point;  could easily have forgotten something I should have mentioned!