Spring RTS Engine

Hi all,

I have this problem. Sometimes whole terrain flashes (it turns gray for a moment). Mostly this happens when I am clicking icons in build menu. But it also happens spontanously when there is big battle.

My graphics card is gf6600gt 128mb, athlon XP3.2, 1gb ram.
Nvidia drivers version 169.21.

It seems that this is not affecting gameplay, spring is stable, but it can get really annoying after while. Ill try to make a movie with this bug.

Did anyone have the same problem ? Or maybe somebody knows what to do to eliminate flashing?

edit:
I've found that it happens only once per building. As if something is getting cached after I select building for the first time.

Not sure where the symptom is coming from, but the correlation is that when you build a building it THEN loads all the textures for any units that building can build into texture memory.

Same thing here. I'll try to find out when exactly it flashes tomorrow tho.

My specs: A64 2800+, R9600XT, 1GB ram and Windows XP sp2.

I get this too. Ati card ovah here.

If you mean the entire screen turns grey for some milliseconds and then normal again I'm having this too - it's really annoying. Especially as I have this when scrolling fast and also when doing nothing while having zoomed out a bit (when being pretty close (too close for real gaming) it's gone)...

I also have another strange problem which occurs when I try to build something. You click on what you want to build but when you want to place it you don't see it anymore. When holding shift planned buildings etc. also disappear. Unselecting the build order doesn't help - you have to put a build order somewhere and after clicking everything turns to normal again and you have to delete and replan what you just placed (if it wasn't placed right). This behaviour came around the 5000er SVN builds but also may relate to the 7.12 driver version...

Athlon 64 X2 4600+
ATI Radeon X1950 XT (Catalyst and/or Omega 7.12)
Win XP Pro SP2

Spring really doesn't preload the skins for models into video RAM before you build them the first time. I've complained about this before, but to no avail- IIRC, it'd involve changing the way that objects are loaded. I've been thinking about curing the problem, at least in P.U.R.E., by using some LUA tricks, and then everybody else could build a more general Widget solution based on something like that code...

[Krogoth86] wrote:If you mean the entire screen turns grey for some milliseconds and then normal again I'm having this too -... I have this when scrolling fast...

You click on what you want to build but when you want to place it you don't see it anymore. When holding shift planned buildings etc. also disappear. Unselecting the build order doesn't help - you have to put a build order somewhere and after clicking everything turns to normal again and you have to delete and replan what you just placed (if it wasn't placed right).

++ for both. it seems to freeze for a bit when i hold down shift, but not all of the time, usually on the first queue of the game.

Argh wrote:Spring really doesn't preload the skins for models into video RAM before you build them the first time. I've complained about this before, but to no avail- IIRC, it'd involve changing the way that objects are loaded.

I personally like this, as otherwise would mean longer loadtimes and more vram usage early on. What needs to be fixed is the grey flash

I just made a small video showing the effect:
http://www.file-upload.net/en/download- ... ng.7z.html

My point of flashing when scrolling might be a mistake though. In those games I always had some AIs running and was spectator. Maybe the irregular flashing came from each player building something for the first time...

I also have tried various different settings i.e. VSync On/Off, Z-Buffer at 24 and 16 Bit, Anti-Aliasing On/off etc. What I haven't tried yet is disabling LUAUI what I'm going to try later...

EDIT:
Oh - my specs again:

Athlon64 X2 4600+
2GB Ram
ATI Radeon X1950 XT (currently running on Omega Driver based on Catalyst 7.12)
Soundblaster Audigy ZS 2 (using kxProject)
Windows XP Pro SP2

Mod used:
BA 6.0 on Small Supreme Battlefield V2 in a game created via SpringSP against one GlobalTest AI...

EDIT2:
Oh - I forgot something important:
If you go ahead and maximize the mini-map to fullscreen and watch a game this way the flickering completely stops...

I have that too. Extremely annoying. Flickering appears when zooming or scrolling for me.

Linux build
GF6800LE - 100.14.19 driver

I personally like this, as otherwise would mean longer loadtimes and more vram usage early on.

If you're going to use it, might as well be up-front. Loading as you select stuff is silly, imo- with bigger units with large textures, it visibly halts the game engine for a fraction of a second, just sitting there reading the hard drive. Might even cause some desyncs, with games like P.U.R.E., where I'm designing for modern hardware.

Just about every major RTS has long loading screens, and everything is preloaded- I think this is one of those areas where Spring is special, and not in a good way. But I'll wait until I have the LUA written before assuming it'll be a major improvement- it probably won't be.

yup i would like to add myself to the list of people getting annoying flashes. my specs are :

7600GT , Vista Ultimate (it flashes when scroling/zooming)

but on my 8800 GTS 512 it doest flash at all (same O/S)