Menus look like shattered glass

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Okay, I know I'm not with it half the time, but I DID get the original running on a 486 sx33 with 4MB RAM when it wanted a dx66 processor. I can even play it in DOS Box on this system of mine. But I can't get the menu screens to display ANYTIHING but an image much like shattered glass with the remake.

My eyes are now bleeding from trying to figure out what I did wrong during installation. I searched the forum for something similar, but I don't see it. Like I said, I'm not really with it by now, so I guess I could have missed something.

I changed the video settings to their very base settings, I even tried various resolutions. I can get in the ship and fly it, I can do all sorts of things, but I can't get into the commodities exchange and buy or sell ANYTHING because I can't see what's there. Same for anything that has a menu. The menu looks like shattered glass. It can't be my video card, why would it give me 3-D graphics for flight and not a flat menu?

Is it me? a corrupt game file? I don't want to download the whole game again and waste your bandwidth.

I'm running an AMD Athlon 1600+ MX with 512 MB RAM an ECS EligeGroup AG315p 256 Bit AGP 4X VGA 64MB SDRAM Video Card (AG315T-64) with the latest drivers available on a Doze 2k system with 12Gig available on a 40Gig HDD. It CAN'T be a drive space issue. Heck, Morrowind and Neverwinter Nights need MASSIVE amounts of disk and RAM to run and they run fine. You can reply here or e-mail wendy atsign* kimem.net. I LOVE The original and I would LOVE to see what all you guys have done to it. From the forum it looks WILD. PLEASE, help this dolt out!

Wendy
 
can you define shattereg glass?

can you give us a screenshot?

run it in windowed mode, hit 'print screen'

start up paint or photoshop

make a new picture + hit paste // you'll see a copy of your monitor appear as the image.

post it somewhere so we can see exactly what you mean.

-scheherazade
 
often times it's because you're out of texture ram.
Most likely you're out of texture ram because your card doesn't support texture compressions like any nvidia or ati card in this century.
We can check if it does support texture compression... Open stderr.txt from the bin directory
and paste the line that starts with
OpenGL Extensions Supported:

The game needs about 128 megs of video ram when landed on base if texture compression is off (only about 32 with texture compression on)

You must remember that the remake does not unload space flight when landed on a base--but instead adds the landing screens.

Also you can right click to move around the cursor.... and then left click on items to get there... that way you don't *really* need to see the images.

BUt do send a screenshots--it could be a buggy driver from your company--there's no way any of the devels have a card like yours.
 
I might add that drivers are *supposed* to do memory management on their own by swapping off textures into normal ram...but ATI has been notoriously guilty about flubbing this in their ATI Rage driivers (if they run out of ram you see corrupt scrambled textures)
 
Wow, talk about getting hammered with responses. FAST ACTION guys!
Thanks. I've got a feeling that I'm not gonna like the answers. After reading the responses, it doesn't look like I'm going to be playing the remake any time soon.

hellcatv said:
often times it's because you're out of texture ram.
Most likely you're out of texture ram because your card doesn't support texture compressions like any nvidia or ati card in this century.
We can check if it does support texture compression... Open stderr.txt from the bin directory
and paste the line that starts with
OpenGL Extensions Supported:

The game needs about 128 megs of video ram when landed on base if texture compression is off (only about 32 with texture compression on)


BUt do send a screenshots--it could be a buggy driver from your company--there's no way any of the devels have a card like yours.

Let's see if I got this Quoting thing down. . .

Yes and no on

OpenGL. Here is a copy/paste form the file.

OpenGL Extensions supported: GL_ARB_multitexture GL_ARB_point_parameters GL_ARB_texture_border_clamp GL_ARB_texture_compression GL_ARB_texture_cube_map GL_ARB_texture_env_add GL_ARB_texture_env_combine GL_ARB_texture_env_crossbar GL_ARB_texture_env_dot3 GL_ARB_texture_mirrored_repeat GL_ARB_transpose_matrix GL_ARB_vertex_program GL_ARB_window_pos GL_EXT_abgr GL_EXT_bgra GL_EXT_blend_color GL_EXT_blend_minmax GL_EXT_blend_subtract GL_EXT_compiled_vertex_array GL_EXT_draw_range_elements GL_EXT_fog_coord GL_EXT_multi_draw_arrays GL_EXT_packed_pixels GL_EXT_polygon_offset GL_EXT_rescale_normal GL_EXT_secondary_color GL_EXT_separate_specular_color GL_EXT_stencil_wrap GL_EXT_swap_control GL_EXT_texture3D GL_EXT_texture_edge_clamp GL_EXT_texture_env_add GL_EXT_texture_env_combine GL_EXT_texture_env_dot3 GL_EXT_texture_lod_bias GL_EXT_texture_object GL_EXT_vertex_array GL_KTX_buffer_region GL_SGIS_multitexture GL_SGIS_texture_edge_clamp GL_SGIS_texture_lod GL_SUN_multi_draw_arrays GL_WIN_swap_hint WGL_ARB_extensions_string WGL_EXT_extensions_string WGL_ARB_pixel_format WGL_EXT_pixel_format WGL_EXT_swap_control
OpenGL::GL_EXT_compiled_vertex_array supported
OpenGL::Accurate Fog Distance unsupported
OpenGL::Generic Texture Compression supported
OpenGL::S3TC Texture Compression unsupported
OpenGL::Multitexture supported
OpenGL::TextureCubeMapExt supported
OpenGL::EXTColorTable unsupported

Print Screen . . . Where would you like me to send the image ShatteredGlass.jpg?

Thanks
Wendy
 
Video Cards

hellcatv said:
I might add that drivers are *supposed* to do memory management on their own by swapping off textures into normal ram...but ATI has been notoriously guilty about flubbing this in their ATI Rage driivers (if they run out of ram you see corrupt scrambled textures)

I got the card a couple of years ago when I built the system. High End Video Games were and are not a major issue with me. I just need enough 'puter to get by on, and this one seems to be doing the major stuff I want admirably. And YES, I DO have an old 486 to play my old DOS games on, I just dislike palying with cables and the like to get it up and running for a few hours. Can't afford all the hardware to switch 'puters easily.

This video card is:
(Taken from the box, yes I still have it)
SiS315 AGP 4X 256-bit 2D/3D Graphic Accelerator
32-bit floating point VLIW Geometry T&L triangle setup engine
"High Performance" DVD Motion Compensation Decoder and Video Accelerator
--(Note the quotes around "High Performance")--
24-bit true-colour RAMDAC, 375MHz pixel clock
DirectX 8 and OpenGL Support
--(Which OpenGL formats are supported is not specified)--
64MB SDRAM on card VGA&TV outputs & 3D-VR connector.


So I guess that since I only have generic texture support, I won't be playing the game. <sigh> I was looking forward to it, too.

The graphics looked GREAT. Besides, I wanted to try out some of those ships that I never got to fly.

The Centurion is sweet, especially if you hack the files and get Engine upgrade five and shield generator eleven. It becomes like an Orion, you can get hammered and STILL not ding your tungsten or plastisteal armour. Heck, you don't need armour with those shields.

The Steltek Gun type II is SWEET, too.

Anyway, feel free to e-mail, but I seriously doubt I'll be able to play the game anytime soon.

I sent the jpeg to the address I saw you post in other posts, Hellcatv, I hope that was okay. Look for a subject something like -- Menu looks like shattered glass


Wendy
 
here's an idea... turn your video settings down--that restricts texture usage :)
there's a max texture size in the file called vegastrike.config

var name="max_texture_dimension" value="256"

turning settings down to "software" or modifying the max_texture_dimension in other sections would reduce the required ram...so you should be able to play
 
hmm looking at your screenshot it's not texture memory
it's that your video card has some sort of bug in its transformation stage, and won't properly draw text...
luckily I use a different method for drawing text for some older video cards (it actually looks nicer)
you can change this by editing vegastrike.config

and setting all instances of high_quality_font to true.

If you want to prototype this to see if it fixes things, just run your game with setup.exe set to software or retro style detail level
 
hellcatv said:
hmm looking at your screenshot it's not texture memory
it's that your video card has some sort of bug in its transformation stage, and won't properly draw text...
luckily I use a different method for drawing text for some older video cards (it actually looks nicer)
you can change this by editing vegastrike.config

and setting all instances of high_quality_font to true.

If you want to prototype this to see if it fixes things, just run your game with setup.exe set to software or retro style detail level


Hey, it did video editing just fine. <smirk> I KNOW it runs a POOR 20th for gaming. But you say it's not acting right? Huh! SiS does it again. LOL

That's what I got it for in the first place, by the way. Video editing while I did some stuff for some professor friends of mine. LOL Games were always second.

Thanks for the ideas. Not to go play file editor in the configs.

Wendy
 
hellcatv said:
hmm looking at your screenshot it's not texture memory
it's that your video card has some sort of bug in its transformation stage, and won't properly draw text...
luckily I use a different method for drawing text for some older video cards (it actually looks nicer)
you can change this by editing vegastrike.config

and setting all instances of high_quality_font to true.

If you want to prototype this to see if it fixes things, just run your game with setup.exe set to software or retro style detail level

Okay, I changed the settings AND I did the edits in the config file. No Joy. I sent off the screen shots of both settings.

I can always download the Micro$lut drivers, but when gaming gets hot and heavy with THOSE, I drop so many frames that I can't make selections or actions in a game. I get waxed in Neverwinter Nights EVERY TIME with those drivers. They seem to FREEZE my screen and my system i/o so badly that the game's AI beats the crap out of me before I can respond, IF I can respond at all. I guess I'll have to wait until I can scounge up the 60 or 70 for a better AGP card. Know of any you can recommend that have TV out? I need the TV out for Video Editing.

Then I'll have to wait till I have the bucks.

Wendy.
 
hellcatv said:
hmm looking at your screenshot it's not texture memory
it's that your video card has some sort of bug in its transformation stage, and won't properly draw text...
luckily I use a different method for drawing text for some older video cards (it actually looks nicer)
you can change this by editing vegastrike.config

and setting all instances of high_quality_font to true.

If you want to prototype this to see if it fixes things, just run your game with setup.exe set to software or retro style detail level

No Joy, No Joy, No Joy.

Game Settings are STIPPED to minimum and I still have nothing usable. Now I can see text overwriting itself, but I still have the shattered glass problem as well.

I see that there are multitudes of problems with this v-card and this game's use of it. I've sent you a copy of my config settings and another set of screen shots, but I fear that this is NOT gonna happen anytime soon.

DARNIT!

Thanks for the help, boss.

I'll be lurking, and you have my e-mail.

I just wish I could play along with the remake.

I guess I'll have to keep tearing up the old game in dos-box or on the 486 SX-50.

By the by, I have a complete set of floppies and the CD for the original game. I can e-mail/uploaded to the server of your choice, that missing file/bad diskette. I also have the latest Dos-Box and My-Jemm for Doze2k/9x/ME/XP. Mind you, it can be a goodly sized up/download, depending on the file you need.

I haven't been able to find a copy of the game new in a LOOOOOONG time and the used ones that I've found on e-bay MIGHT work. These DO work.

I KNOW there are some people out there that would LOVE to give it a play IF they could get that original WASTED programme CD to play or that bad floppy to load. My FIRST CD died an ugly death of overuse in an old CDR. Yeah, it overheated and separated the plys. My original programme floppies developed bad sectors. Thank the stars that I copied everything to another couple of CDs before that happened.

I also have a bunch of cheat files to go with, if you're interested. E-mail me and I'll see what I can do to get you that missing file. Contact me at wendy atsign* kimem.net

Since you're all here debating the merrits of the original -vs.- the remake, I can assume you have all purchased the original game yourselves and my sending you the odd file wouldn't be copyright violation, just programme maintenance.

Wnedy.

ANd maybe I'll even learn to spell my name while I'm at it.

Wendy.
 
Is the GX-400 a viable Video card?

HellcatV,
Someone is graciously GIVING me a GX-400 card -- I do NOT know more than that about the card -- 256MB more RAM and a 2.4GHz processor. COULD these POSSIBLY make a difference for me and the menu issues?

Wendy
wendy atsign* kimem.net
 
Should fix your issues :)
I've never heard of your issue--it's very vendor specific--as long as the card is made by a company with a slightly different driver tree it should work...basically if it isn't buggy it should work fine
 
It'll work?!?

hellcatv said:
Should fix your issues :)
I've never heard of your issue--it's very vendor specific--as long as the card is made by a company with a slightly different driver tree it should work...basically if it isn't buggy it should work fine

KHUELE!!!

YAY!!! I''ll be able to play the game!!!

I can't wait till I get the package in the mail.
Thanks for all your help HellcatV

Wendy.
 
hellcatv said:
Maybe tomorrow ;-)

We don't get mail here on sunday

I know, but. . .'SNOT FAIR!
<---Stamps foot and pushes lower lip out

I WANT IT NOW!!!

Okay, tantrum over.

<SNIFF!>
 
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