Nitro glitch?

[mr_Spoon]

Hi,

When I deploy nitro with 'Animated Scenery' enabled in the graphics settings menu the game momentarily stutters. When I have this option disabled it doesn't happen. It doen't happen with the collectable zipper items or when I drive over a boost thingy (e.g. two of them in 'Oliver's Math Class' track) which even has motion-blur but does not cause any slowdown, only deployment of the nitro causes the problem. Note that it feels as if the texture is taking a moment to be loaded, however, if I quickly re-deploy nitro the glitch doesn't happen but if a wait a few more seconds & re-deploy nitro the glitch happens again.

I've tried various things to see if I could fix this. I overwrote nitro-particle.png with the zipper-particle.png one to check if it was corrupted but it didn't fix it. I also edited nitro.xml to use zipper-particle.png rather than nitro-particle.png, no change. I have played around with 0.8 & SNV, both exhibit the same issue. I have edited some of the nitro variables in nitro.xml & stk_config.xml also, but no success so far. The game works fine without enabling Animated Scenery, but it'd be nice to be able to see the particle effects. Why does nitro do it but the other similar effects don't? I don't see how this could be a driver issue, but I'm no expert.

Linux Debian Squeeze, 32bit, KDE.
Athlon64 X2 4200+, 2Gb RAM,
ATi Radeon HD4650 AGP, 1Gb, using fglrx driver. This card is fast enough for Doom3, DynamiteJack in Linux & even Crysis1 in Windows.

Thanks in advance for any help.

[Auria]

Hi,

this is the first time ever something like that is reported, so I am inclined to think it's somehow linked to your particular setup. As such I am not sure what we can do about it...

[hiker]

this is the first time ever something like that is reported, so I am inclined to think it's somehow linked to your particular setup. As such I am not sure what we can do about it...

Are the nitro loaded on demand? It might just be the loading time. I notice this the first time I use a zipper in my debug builds.

Cheers,
Joerg

[mr_Spoon]

Joerg, I'm glad to see that you have noticed this too! Is there currently a way to pre-load or cache the textures? If the nitro is loaded differently from the others it'd be good to make it the same as them.

[hiker]

Joerg, I'm glad to see that you have noticed this too! Is there currently a way to pre-load or cache the textures? If the nitro is loaded differently from the others it'd be good to make it the same as them.

Just to be sure, that only happens the very first time you use nitro in the game (so even in a new race that's not noticeable anymore?) I have to check that code, that was done a looong time ago. I'd also have to check with what particles exactly it happens, I always assumed it would be all particles, but am not entirely sure. Unfortunately I am too busy atm, perhaps open a ticket?

Cheers,
J oerg

[mr_Spoon]

It is not only the first time I use it. It always does it unless I re-deploy it within about half a second or something (guesstimate). It is only collected nitro canister powerups that do this; the ^ arrow boost things & the red/yellow ground based zoom strips don't have the problem. The problem still occurs if i do a new race. No other particle effects do it that I have noticed.

If its best for me to raise a ticket, could you please point me in the right direction as i don't know how to do this.

EDIT: do i just create a sourceforge account & then raise a ticket via: http://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/supertuxkart/report/1 ?

[Auria]

We can certainly fix the lag when using particles the first time, but this is certainly not a problem that should happen everytime you use nitro. My only guess at this time, which might be wrong but I have no better idea, is that somehow a texture unused for a long enough time gets paged out of your GPU

[mr_Spoon]

Thanks Auria, I look forward to trying out any changes made to fix this, much appreciated. Fingers-crossed it'll resolve the whole issue. If there's any code that causes the nitro texture to be paged out (after only a very short time), it'd be great if that could be checked out if possible.