Spring RTS Engine

I also have a similar prob. Spring would keep crashing every time i tried to play saying i needed to update my GFX driver. I just got the new 10.7 beta driver. It now loads but the map is very dark you can almost see nothing and its not rendered properly. I have a HD 4850. Why have so many people with HD 4XXX cards been fucked over.. I just wanna play my spring. I have tried many driver even reinstalled windows!! I just dont know what to do.

I had this same problem on my HD5870. I have installed the beta driver in the link provided by Yuri and it fixes the problem. I am running window7 64bit. Here is a close up of what a metal extractor looked like before the fix: http://members.cox.net/~dpsurny/screen00002.png

Mine load with the 10.7beta drivers but looks like this its unplayable.

Draven wrote:I have tried many driver even reinstalled windows!! I just dont know what to do.

Strange. Did you completely format your HDD and installed Cat10.7Beta then?

Also don't use 3rd party utilities like Asus Doctor, Gigabyte blahblah, etc. They might screw some things.

Yes complete format and 10.7b drivers...... Im at my wits end..

hoijui wrote:95% of other games on windows use DirectX, which is also the reason why they are not released for Linux btw (-> no, we will not use DirectX), while spring uses OpenGL.

Spring can always go though SC2 route and support directx and open GL.

Super Mario wrote:

hoijui wrote:95% of other games on windows use DirectX, which is also the reason why they are not released for Linux btw (-> no, we will not use DirectX), while spring uses OpenGL.

Spring can always go though SC2 route and support directx and open GL.

Do you have any idea how much abstraction and refactoring, not to mention the reimplementation of the whole rendering system that would entail? Spring could also cure cancer. Get on it.

there is nothing wrong with GL, the problem is in the drivers.

I've tested 10.3 for a while, it is total crap, 3870 xp32 here.
so I decided to give up 10.x (and GL 3.2 support along with it), now testing 9.12, so far have none of these bugs: BSOD with 2 springs / refresh rate lock to 60 / sping crash pointing to driver library / square particles. but still testing. 8.3, 8.4 and 8.6 also work well but may not work with 4000 and 5000.

nice Manoa, that is the right thing to do.

Peet wrote:

Super Mario wrote:

hoijui wrote:95% of other games on windows use DirectX, which is also the reason why they are not released for Linux btw (-> no, we will not use DirectX), while spring uses OpenGL.

Spring can always go though SC2 route and support directx and open GL.

Do you have any idea how much abstraction and refactoring, not to mention the reimplementation of the whole rendering system that would entail? Spring could also cure cancer. Get on it.

Where the hell did you think that I imply that it's going to be easy?

... can always go ...

with this possibly?

it was really simply a stupid thing to say, you just make yourself looks more stupid, trying to defend yourself there.

hoijui wrote:

... can always go ...

with this possibly?

What else can the spring devs do besides asking users to annoy the crap out of ati to fix their drivers? Creating a warring label for ati cards certainly isn't going to increase the attraction for this engine.

Super Mario wrote:asking users to annoy the crap out of ati to fix their drivers

that!
the only reasonable thing is, ATI fixing its drivers. though, fixing is kind of an understatement.

Manoa wrote:there is nothing wrong with GL, the problem is in the drivers.
...

The problem is, that drivers in fact contains OGL nowadays. Especially HD5xxx series users gets benefit from fresh drivers, so stucking with 1/4 year old drivers isn't very cool.

Lower series users can benefit from new drivers too. For instance: Cat10.7 brought HW-accel to VLC media player, currently at Win platform only.

So stucking with old drivers seriously suck :/

Only solution is to notify ATi about their problems all over again...

Draven wrote:Yes complete format and 10.7b drivers...... Im at my wits end..

From the ATI web site I installed 10-7_vista64_win7_64_dd_ccc_enu.exe and on top of that I applied the ati_catalyst_10.7beta_opengl_es2.0_win7_vista.exe file from the link provided by Yuri a few posts back in this thread. Try that combination and you should be good to go.

I agree this is an ATI issue (and probably a Microsoft one too) but at the same time it's a Spring issue. I constantly ask myself why, with so many people having ATI issues, we haven't yet managed to isolate the root causes and disable those things as needed.

I think it's safe to say that most Spring players aren't playing it for the awesome graphics. So what I don't get is why there isn't a rendering mode that disables lups, shaders, line stipples, funky lighting, bumpmaps, shadows, etc, etc, all in one hit in such a way that the game can work on bad drivers. TA didn't have any shaders, and it still, to this day, looks fine.

I haven't really spent the time on this I wanted to (I been planning an engine rewrite for some time) so I know I'm speaking out of place in a way - but I don't think this issue has ever been given the priority it deserves. The usual reason given is none of the devs have ATI cards which is a reasonable barrier - but still.

When I eventually manage to get some free time I'm going to make a point of implementing a flat texture mode that works using no advanced features whatsoever - just pure OpenGL 1.0 - and see whether this solves the ATI bugs.

Once we know for sure what DOESN'T crash ATI drivers we can focus again on alternative implementations of the things that do.

as i got it, the problem is not that simple as in "crashes on ATI driver or not", but rather "feature X crashes on ATI driver version Y and ATI hardware Z". reducing spring to OpenGL 1.0 for all ATI users sure will not bring you many fans. reading the forum, i can not imagine that so many users would be satisfied with low GFX quality.

catalyst 10.8 fixed the bug for me in win7 64bit :D

thats what I am waited for tommorow I try it on 64 bit.

hoijui wrote:reducing spring to OpenGL 1.0 for all ATI users sure will not bring you many fans. reading the forum, i can not imagine that so many users would be satisfied with low GFX quality.

I meant as a fallback "safe mode" for older hardware, netbooks and flakey drivers. You'd only activate it if you can't play with normal settings.