Graphical glitches

[silhouette]

happyfunlarry said:
I don't particularly care for graphics in a game like this so I hit the "w" key to turn it all off and see if that helps. It speeds things up quite nicely but often when a soldier receives damage things will go glitchy and sometimes entire armies disappear, which then promptly reappear if I use the arrow keys to move the battle view around.

I can't speak to what new problems may appear on Vista, but the above described problem is not new. This is day-1 ugly behavior, and I am going to feel foolish if this is not already a well known problem. It appears that somewhere a graphical mask or stencil is not handled correctly. If you pause the battle when there are units disappeared, and then scroll the playfield, you can see the units again, but parts of the units which are now on the screen at their location are masked -- it is exactly as if a stencil is made of the units to draw over them, and then when the viewport scrolls, the mask doesn't, and it blanks out whatever else is behind it now. If you scroll the view back exactly where it was before you moved it, you can put the units back directly behind their stencil mask and they disappear again. If I didn't describe it well, let me know and I can try and get screenshots.

I run it with command line "-x", but it also happens without if you use the 'w' wireframe battle replay. It's somehow because of the floating damage numbers, since the masking happens when a unit is damaged and the numbers float up, but when I use "--noarcade -x" it is ok.

I just re-tested the demo installed on a Pentium4 2.8G running RHEnterprise 2.4.21-27 (it might be my work computer, ). Here's the library list.
]> ldd dom3demo_x86 -x
dom3demo_x86:
libGL.so.1 => /usr/lib/libGL.so.1 (0x40017000)
libGLU.so.1 => /usr/lib/libGLU.so.1 (0x4005b000)
libpthread.so.0 => /lib/tls/libpthread.so.0 (0x400e9000)
libSDL-1.2.so.0 => /usr/lib/libSDL-1.2.so.0 (0x400f9000)
libc.so.6 => /lib/tls/libc.so.6 (0x40171000)
libm.so.6 => /lib/tls/libm.so.6 (0x402a9000)
libdl.so.2 => /lib/libdl.so.2 (0x402cb000)
libXext.so.6 => /usr/X11R6/lib/libXext.so.6 (0x402cf000)
libX11.so.6 => /usr/X11R6/lib/libX11.so.6 (0x402dd000)
libstdc++.so.5 => /usr/lib/libstdc++.so.5 (0x403bc000)
libgcc_s.so.1 => /lib/libgcc_s.so.1 (0x40472000)
/lib/ld-linux.so.2 => /lib/ld-linux.so.2 (0x40000000)


Sill

[happyfunlarry]

You described it exactly Sil. Happens every time you get the attack "animation" or when they're moving about the screen, etc.

I've updated the drivers and now I'm back up to around 30 fps with all the bells and whistles turned on. So thanks for that tip, I should've seen it coming. I'm almost certain, however, that any driver's I've ever had are Vista compliant, whatever that may entail, because the motherboard is a Vista motherboard. And by that I mean it won't run XP setup for some reason, even from a fresh format. If I spent any time trying to figure out that reason I'd probably turn into Lewis Black. Might be my own fault for buying a computer from Best Buy though.

Just curious, does anyone here run Dom3 on Vista?

Still have the graphical mask problem as Silhouette described but only when in wireframe mode. So, no huge deal now that I'm above 1(one) fps.

Thanks guys.

[lch]

happyfunlarry said:
Just curious, does anyone here run Dom3 on Vista?

There are a few unlucky ones that you can see have reported problems before, running Vista, yes.