The FFED3D Thread

Steve · Mar 21, 2013

Ittiz said:
Wow what's with the video being all jumped up? What resolution are you running at, maybe I can replicate the problem.

Not sure what you mean by this. If you mean the frame rate is a bit low, that's probably because I'm running fraps at the same time as the game, to capture the video.
My computer's getting a bit old as well, to be honest. I plan to do a major upgrade around the time Elite: Dangerous is released

Ittiz · Mar 21, 2013

Steve said:
Not sure what you mean by this. If you mean the frame rate is a bit low, that's probably because I'm running fraps at the same time as the game, to capture the video.
My computer's getting a bit old as well, to be honest. I plan to do a major upgrade around the time Elite: Dangerous is released

Here's a link to a new exe file.

It should fix the issue with falling through the planets and bases you can't land on. Just copy it over the old exe.

Steve · Mar 21, 2013

Thanks Ittiz. That has indeed cured that particular bug. If you could eradicate the "scintillation" as you put it, things would be very good indeed :smilie:

nanite2000 · Mar 22, 2013

I've got a very strange problem. The latest version I downloaded has no sound. No music, no sound FX - nothing.

I fired up the previous beta and it works fine.

Did you change anything to do with how sound is output?

nanite2000 · Mar 22, 2013

nanite2000 said:
I've got a very strange problem. The latest version I downloaded has no sound. No music, no sound FX - nothing.

I fired up the previous beta and it works fine.

Did you change anything to do with how sound is output?

After a bit of testing, the problem seems to be due to lack of resources.

I'm running a Pentium Core i5, 8GB RAM, a GeForce GTX 550 Ti 4GB graphics card, 740GB free disk space, and Windows 7 x64. The CPU usage and memory are barely touching 40% while the game is running.

But I get problems with missing textures and missing sounds. Some sounds play (around 20 seconds into the game), but most are missing.

Can anyone tell me what may be the cause of the problem here?

Geraldine · Mar 22, 2013

Hi nanite2000
I had similar problems (no starfields) when trying to download the original FFE3D from the Russian Elite site. It turned out that the problem was an incomplete download. Check that all the files are there. If there are any missing, copy them across from your previous fully working version, although don't overwrite what's there already.
Hope that helps.

nanite2000 · Mar 22, 2013

Geraldine said:
Hi nanite2000
I had similar problems (no starfields) when trying to download the original FFE3D from the Russian Elite site. It turned out that the problem was an incomplete download. Check that all the files are there. If there are any missing, copy them across from your previous fully working version, although don't overwrite what's there already.
Hope that helps.

Hi,

I checked the ZIP file contents - it's fine. When I play the game, some textures are consistently not rendered (e.g. mountain sides), and others appear and disappear randomly (the sun, starfields, planet textures).

It's like there's not enough memory to handle it all, but surely my setup's not that out of date...? I've tried reducing the rendering detail in the .CFG file, and I'm running all the latest drivers too. But no luck.

EDIT: Additionally, videos playback at twice their normal speed. But still no sound.

Geraldine · Mar 22, 2013

Hi nanite2000
I would say your system is more than upto the job. Since the older version works, perhaps trying to compare the CFG files and noting down any differences? Wish I could be of more help, but I have not had a chance yet to try Ittiz's builds.

Steve · Mar 22, 2013

Was flying around the Sol system when all the background stars suddenly disappeared.

Ittiz · Mar 22, 2013

I haven't touched the sounds

If the star background disappears there is a possibility that it's related to the code that makes the stars not visible during the day (took quite a bit of work to achieve). If more than the star background is disappearing it could be a video thing. It may still be possible to slip out of a planet's atmosphere during the day without the stars turning back on. They should slowly become more and more visible the higher you go. Most of these problems you guys are describing I have been unable to replicate.

Also try the 3.5 exe on the previous page, it should fix problems with bases floating and inside planets.

nanite2000 · Mar 23, 2013

Ittiz said:
I haven't touched the sounds

The problems definitely related to resources. If I run the game first time after restarting my computer, it works fine. Subsequent attempts means it will run without music or sound, and textures and objects will randomly disappear. Until I restart the computer, and then it will run fine again.

Ittiz said:
Also try the 3.5 exe on the previous page, it should fix problems with bases floating and inside planets.

I tried that and it consistently fails to play any sounds at all, and causes many textures to disappear - especially mountainsides.
I've tried copying the config file settings over from previous versions, but they don't make any difference.

If I run any of the previous betas, they all run fine.

:S

Steve · Mar 23, 2013

I think bug fixing in FFE is a bit like that Whack-A-Mole game you play at the fairground

As far as hogging system resources go, my computer's spec is a lot less impressive than Nanite2000's (try dual core Pentium 4, 2Gb ram) and I don't get sound issues. My biggest problem is the strange effects on planet surfaces.

What would really help with setting up the config file, is some sort of clue as to what the various options do.

I'm referring to:-

# Dist for max divide deep
control_dist=20000000
# Max divide deep
max_divide_deep=8
# Real time optimizer (0 - disable, 1 - enable)
smart_optimizer=1
# smart optimizer factor
smart_optimizer_c=3

which may help myself and others to improve things, if only we knew what all this does!

Ittiz · Mar 23, 2013

I guess I need to work on memory issue next I suppose. One of the big problems is the game loads absolutely all the textures and models into memory at the start.

nanite2000 · Mar 23, 2013

Ittiz said:
I guess I need to work on memory issue next I suppose. One of the big problems is the game loads absolutely all the textures and models into memory at the start.

Yea - I've seen similar problems in the past with missing textures, and it was because my textures were too big.

I'll try shrinking the textures down and let you know how it goes.

Could you give me some config file examples of High and Low usage? I'll try running the game at lower settings.

Ittiz · Mar 24, 2013

nanite2000 said:
Yea - I've seen similar problems in the past with missing textures, and it was because my textures were too big.

I'll try shrinking the textures down and let you know how it goes.

Could you give me some config file examples of High and Low usage? I'll try running the game at lower settings.

Some of the textures need to be really big or they look bad, like clouds for instance. The trick there is that if they don't need to be full color use as few colors as you can to save memory. I downed the cloud textures (and other black and white textures) to 256 colors from 16.7 million colors to save memory. The key thing will be to get the game to only load them when it needs them. Then unload them when it doesn't need them Something the Russians did in some of the later versions, but they also made some many other changes I didn't want that I didn't use any of those versions.

Oh about the settings the settings listed earlier are the regular low settings. Quite frankly I don't understand them all fully because some of them are used in so many places. The control distance is basically the distance the detail divisions begin at. Due to bugs in the way the distance code works for the planets (one of the major reasons planets used to clip each other wrong), control distance doesn't seem to do much because inside the game your actual distance to any object never exceeds 65k. Increasing the max divide deep increases the divisions, hence the planet detail. The Smart Optimization is a clever function that automatically uses the minimum bit size needed to calculate planet detail, making things way faster. I don't think it's actually supposed to effect the actual detail, but it seems to anyway though. The Smart optimization factor actually decreases detail. After all the calculations are done for deciding the planet detail level the detail level may still be higher than it needs to be and this essentially lowers the detail down a bit. The dod (detail over distance) is a factor I made to make the detail decrease over distance correctly. It still doesn't work quite right.

Steve · Mar 24, 2013

Thanks for the explanation. I'll experiment with the settings when I have some time.

The bug with the stars disappearing seems to be related to whether the game stores the flag to make the stars appear. I can save a game with the stars visible, and when I re-load it the stars have gone. Using Stardreamer for a few hours gets it all right again.

Getting a lot of untextured planets as well...

...which I presume is related to the texture issues others have been experiencing

Garmik · Mar 25, 2013

Awesome work Izzit. But I'm having the no sound problem as well

Which kills the mood for me, I need the pew-pews.

Ittiz · Mar 25, 2013

Garmik said:
Awesome work Izzit. But I'm having the no sound problem as well Which kills the mood for me, I need the pew-pews.

Hahaha, well maybe I should put a little berry white in there to smooth the mood

would make great docking music.

Ittiz · Mar 26, 2013

Just wondering if any of you who've had resource issues have tried removing the videos to free up resources?

nanite2000 · Mar 27, 2013

Ittiz said:
Just wondering if any of you who've had resource issues have tried removing the videos to free up resources?

Hi,

Yea - I tried that, but no joy unfortunately.

As an aside though, I just want to say that even without the sound/music, and even though the textures keep disappearing, when it *does* work it looks *amazing*.

Seriously, even just at the starting point of the game (Gateway), sit there and watch the sun go round - the daytime-nighttime transitions look really good. The red sunsets, and the smooth transition as the stars reveal themselves at night is spot on.

I would say that, in terms of effects, there's no need to push it much further (ooh - except maybe the ripple effects on the water you proposed a while ago). When the stability issues are resolved, this game is going to look incredible.