Alfa14 produces runtime error on startup

[UncleBob]

I've no been following the project for a while, now I remembered it and wanted to try out the new alfa. Problem is, it doesn't work anymore on my machine. The old Alfa 9 I also have on the drive still works flawlessly.If I try to start pioneer, I see "simulating the evolution of the universe: 4.5 bilion years" for about 2 seconds, then windows ruins the party. The modelviewer crashes also with the same error.System is Win7 32bit, AMD athlon dualcore, Asus EAH5770 graphics card. I installed the newest gpu-drivers just to make sure (and had to go through some pains for it, because some sloppy Win-update manages to crash the catalyst installer, and you have to shift some dll's around to make it work again. yay microsoft!)Here's a report on the error, in case that's any help (german system I'm afraid, but I'm sure it's not the first one you see, so you should know what is what...):
Code:
Problemsignatur: Problemereignisname: APPCRASH Anwendungsname: pioneer.exe Anwendungsversion: 0.0.0.0 Anwendungszeitstempel: 4e6ed130 Fehlermodulname: pioneer.exe Fehlermodulversion: 0.0.0.0 Fehlermodulzeitstempel: 4e6ed130 Ausnahmecode: 40000015 Ausnahmeoffset: 000eea66 Betriebsystemversion: 6.1.7601.2.1.0.768.3 Gebietsschema-ID: 2055 Zusatzinformation 1: 5a9f Zusatzinformation 2: 5a9f99f0fbf43efeace857f0731f95f2 Zusatzinformation 3: f6f2 Zusatzinformation 4: f6f24d89e0edd88075ce1878f9ed2ab8
Any Ideas of what might be my problem?

[s2odan]

Hi
Quote:
Any Ideas of what might be my problem?
Maybe. Go to Documents/Pioneer and delete the model cache then try to load the game again.If that has no effect then have a look for the files 'stdout.txt' and stderr.txt' which should be in your documents directory or if not in there will/should be in the directory where the pioneer.exe is located. There were problems with finding stdout.txt on certain builds but I think that was solved.

[UncleBob]

Thanks a lot, it was the model cache. I didn't know that pioneer was dumping anything into my documents folder. I guess the old model cache was still there from the old Alpha and wasn't compatible with the new one?

[UncleBob]

Now, for some reason my planets don't show any detail, even if I ramp up planet textures, fractal detail and detail distance to max. Doesn't seem to show any effect, although I can definitaley see an effect when changing city detail. Some nice music in there now, though...

[s2odan]

Yeah model caching was added by Tom a while back to reduce the loading times, at one point the original cache became incompatible with the game or something like that.
Quote:
for some reason my planets don't show any detail, even if I ramp up planet textures, fractal detail and detail distance to max. Doesn't seem to show any effect
Im not so sure about this one. Could you press Ctrl+I and give a read-out of the terrain vertex/second for veryvery high and for very low detail settings.

[UncleBob]

Distance and fractal detail on minimum:http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/9/minsx.jpg/Both on Maximum:http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/191/maxdetail.jpg/A difference of 100000-odd polygons, but you see for yourself that the landscape on highest setting looks earily familiar to the original frontier...

[robn]

That's a known bug which I believe was introduced a couple of weeks ago. It seems that under certain circumstances (including the start points) city buildings and ground starports are placed under the terrain. The insides of planets aren't really rendered properly (why would you?) which is why everything looks weird.I started working to identify the problem late last night and will continue today. Not sure if it will be easy or hard but I anticipate at least a workaround won't be difficult and should be in a nightly build soon.For now just play the game and pretend its not there. Terrains still work great, its just city placement that is screwy.

[s2odan]

Ah, if that is indeed what it is then I think you should be able to get around it by restarting Pioneer when you change the detail settings, is that right Robn?

[UncleBob]

Quote:
It seems that under certain circumstances (including the start points) city buildings and ground starports are placed under the terrain. The insides of planets aren't really rendered properly (why would you?) which is why everything looks weird.
Nope, unfortunately definitaley not just that. Problem persists while flying.
Quote:
Ah, if that is indeed what it is then I think you should be able to get around it by restarting Pioneer when you change the detail settings, is that right Robn?
I had already tried that, of course. No effect.No outputs in Stderr.txtas far as I can tell stdout isn't a log-file, so I guess it's pointless to post its content...

[robn]

UncleBob wrote:


Quote:
It seems that under certain circumstances (including the start points) city buildings and ground starports are placed under the terrain. The insides of planets aren't really rendered properly (why would you?) which is why everything looks weird.
Nope, unfortunately definitaley not just that. Problem persists while flying.
What do you mean by "flying". If you're still close to the ground then you're likely still inside the terrain. If you've moved away from the ground then you should be seeing things as normal. You'd better post more screenshots.

[UncleBob]

low earth orbit, doesn't look too bad:http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/607/orbit.jpg/then descending to a low flyby, terrain and textures seem to not get more detailed when aproaching:http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/11/lowalt.jpg/Same happens on other planets I tried.In Alpha 9 terrain generation still works fine. Something must have crept in somewhere, but it seems like the problem seems to occur very rarely and might be very system specific, or someone else would have posted it by now.

[Brianetta]

If you loiter, it'll get more resolute. Alpha 9's terrain generator was a different animal entirely.

[UncleBob]

I loitered for something like 2 minutes, without significant change. Compaired to the lightning speed of the terrain engine in Alpha 9 I can't quite believe that this is the way it should be...

[durandal]

You are looking at wrong terrain. At that altitude you can not expect forest on mount everest.

[UncleBob]

I wasn't expecting any forrests at all. Are there forrests in the new generator? coooool...Anyways, the altitude is somewhat around 27-ish kilometers based on relative distance and earth radius, at such an altitude textures and terrain were a lot more detailed in Alpha 9. If that is indeed supposed to be like this, I'm not quite sure wheather to consider the new generator an improvement, so I'm still pretty convinced that something is going wrong.

[s2odan]

It doesn't sound normal at all to get that much of a performance hit between alpha9 and 14. Performance should have improved, providing settings are equal.. Basically you should get noticably better performance than alpha 9 with these settings: Distance : Normal/MediumFractal Detail: Normal/mediumTextures: OffThis is about the equivalent to Planet detail High in previous alphas.Textures is a big hit on performance which is why its optional. (They aren't true textures but rather procedural fractals for complete randomness, this requires CPU time)Try this one out Bob and let me know if there is any improvment in performance, I have a theory.... http://dl.dropbox.com/u/9655550/pioneer.7z
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I wasn't expecting any forrests at all. Are there forrests in the new generator? coooool...
Pseudo forrests made with the textures, no actual trees yet. Its just a feature you will see from orbit, or during flight. At ground level its just a pattern on the ground

[UncleBob]

Quote:
Textures is a big hit on performance which is why its optional. (They aren't true textures but rather procedural fractals for complete randomness, this requires CPU time)
Thanks, there was my problem. Obviously that innocent setting managed to clog up my CPU so badly that pretty much nothing went anymore generating-wise. Are you planning to shove off some of the generators load to the GPU in the future?

[s2odan]

I'd like to but my latest experiments using GPU generated noise left a lot to be desired So it will be a while yet. Fluffy freak and Luomu probably(do) know a lot more about it than me so they might end up having a go.Although I recently optimised textures somewhat to use a lot less CPU time, in-fact I think that .7z file I posted has those changes in it.