FreeGameDev

I've been working on my arena, and I feel I've gotten it to a point where I can sort of start fine-tuning its looks.

Unfortunately, I've been unable to find a point in stk-code's commit history that 1)works with the current assets and 2)has a fully functional renderer. Every version I've tried has either crashed or displayed what is presumably a debug view when advanced features turned on.

Does anyone know of a relatively recent point in stk-code's commit history that fulfills the above criteria?

Hello

1)works with the current assets

What do you mean by work with current assets ? The only track that use the library asset is chocolate.

2)has a fully functional renderer

We need do know your GPU and your operating system. Be sure to have the latest drivers and an updated operating system.

I've opted to use the objects from chocolate to make my arena, along with a few custom nodes, which is why I need the build to work the them.

I'm on Fedora Linux 20, with a Nvidia Geforce GTX 650 TI as my GPU and the latest of the 304 (304.123) series of drivers installed through the RPM Fusion repository. I have to use 304 to enable CUDA for rendering in Blender, but I don't think that's the issue, since Sanctum 2 (Unreal Engine 3) and Unigine Heaven run fine.

A build of stk-code at commit "5b633f0487d13d6b149f1785b9a42cda046658e8" will display either what looks like the z-buffer, or shadeless red, depending on the graphics settings. In an earlier build, I could at least get close to normal graphics with Advanced Pipeline turned off.

Also, normals debug view works fine.

I'd really like to get this issue solved quickly, since it's almost impossible to move forwards with my arena without being able to properly test it.


Fort Magma:

Hum
That's a problem. With this gpu it should work fine. Which drivers are you using ?
You should use the latest proprietary version.

Also you said that you are using chocolate objects. How did you put them into your track ?
You should link them so if we update the assets they will be updated.

Sam

Wow, that's strange, I have an older NVIDIA card myself and I'm using Linux too, but I have never seen anything like this. I'm using version 331.38 of the driver though. Recently I had an issue where I needed to turn on global illumination or it would be like the second screenshot but black instead. I need to check how things work with latest... and eventually bisect the issue I mentioned, and file a report.

If nobody can reproduce the issue, you may clean the texture cache. Also check that bindless - texture is disabled in your config file.

@samuncle: Like I said, I'm using the latest proprietary nvidia drivers from the 304 series, which seem to be the only ones with CUDA support, at least for my GPU.

I added the chocolate objects with linking. I've also checked the scene.xml, and everything seems to be right.


@Arthur: I think it also shows the second screen to me with GI off.


@vlj: I just checked bindless textures, it's set to false. How do I clear my texture cache?

Also, I just launched the game again and got these weird green triangles on my screen during the race and in the kart selection screen:

Any idea what they are?

Ok it's the right thing to do (for linked object). But Did you use ALT + D to duplicate them ?

Alt + D = Duplicate object and keep the link
Shift + D = Duplicate object and make a complete copy that can be modified.

An object from the library should never be duplicated with Shift + D. Otherwise if we modify the object in the library it won't be updated :3.

For the driver, I use on xubuntu the 331 series. According to nvidia your GPU GTX 650 TI is supported. http://www.geforce.com/drivers/results/73221

Yep, alt-D to duplicate, never used shift-D, etc. I was especially careful not to mess up the library links, so I even checked the number of objects in scene.xml against the number in Blender.

I'll try the 331 drivers from RPM Fusion, and see how they work.

Um... that definitely did something.



On the plus side, updating to the new driver hasn't broken CUDA as i expected it would.

Interestingly, if I try to render with the GPU in Blender when a track is open in Supertuxkart, I get an error message from Blender telling me I'm out of "Out of memory in cuLaunchGrid(cuPathTrace, xblocks, yblocks)".


EDIT: I decided to run the game while monitoring my GPU temperature, and found that it rises quite quickly. It took ~1 minute to get from 40 C to 53, and then slightly over 2 minutes to get to 60.

However, GPU rendering in Blender takes only ~1 minute to get to 60 degrees, so STK doesn't seem to be maxing my card, at least in terms of processing power.


EDIT 2: I just tested the game on another machine (Ubuntu 14.04 w/ Geforce GT 610), and the graphics are fine. I'm considering deleting my config files to see if that would help, but first I want to make sure that there isn't any reason to keep them for debugging purposes.


EDIT 3: The result of running 0.8.1, and then returning to the git with Advanced Pipeline turned off (in a new build) (on still shows the zbuffer):

Shadeless textures look normal.

Sorry for spamming all these edits, I'm just trying to provide as much information as possible to help resolve the problem, whatever it may be.


EDIT 4: The strange thing about this is how completely inconsistent it is. Ever since the textures started showing, there's been minute differences pretty much every time I launched the game. Sometimes, the skybox will won't show, sometimes alpha won't work, sometimes fog is broken, or shading is present on some parts. It's weird. Could this imply that it's at least partly a hardware issue?

After testing five different builds of the game, I've determined that the commit which introduced this problem lies between between fcb80cdb2c1543ebe00cb21d568ad13b55c04d31, which works perfectly, and 6a48010644855bfff57efa3a95513f427101d52f, which only displays the zbuffer on maxed settings.

EDIT 2: I just tested the game on another machine (Ubuntu 14.04 w/ Geforce GT 610), and the graphics are fine. I'm considering deleting my config files to see if that would help, but first I want to make sure that there isn't any reason to keep them for debugging purposes.

After testing five different builds of the game, I've determined that the commit which introduced this problem lies between between fcb80cdb2c1543ebe00cb21d568ad13b55c04d31, which works perfectly, and 6a48010644855bfff57efa3a95513f427101d52f, which only displays the zbuffer on maxed settings.

Well it means that it's probably a driver problem (but you should wait vlj for a more detailed answer). Have you any way to test with this GPU on windows ?

Unfortunately not, at least without going through a lot of trouble that wouldn't be worth the end result.

I could test the GPU on Ubuntu and Linux Mint machines (each with a different driver version), though, if it would be a significant help in solving the problem.

Although, it seems strange to me that a driver issue would span across two driver series. Also, the driver I have on the Fedora machine is newer than the one on Ubuntu (331.89 > 331.38)

I think you should try to backup your STK config folder (i.e. rename ~/.config/supertuxkart and maybe also ~/.local/share/supertuxkart) and run it with a brand new config, to see if it fixes something.

Thanks, but I already tried that to no avail (at least with .config).

On another note, my original problem of not having a build to test on has been solved by building 2a473a550a966e5b353200d51c28e35604d8ca50.