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Post by stargrazer on Jan 6, 2008 21:39:34 GMT -5
With multisampling turned on (any level) movies do not play correctly, either WMV or MPEG. Movie audio plays correctly, but the video is not displayed, sometimes flashing on briefly and then back to "Loading...". Movies do play correctly (both formats) with multisampling turned off. This is unfortunate as the graphics are much better with multisampling, but the movies are nice to have.
configuration:
SpaceStationSim v2.2.0.0
Windows Vista 32 bit
Intel E6600, 2 gig ram
Nvidia 8600 GTs, Forceware 169.25
DirectX 10.0
I would think that this would be an easy thing to fix in a future release, if nothing else by turning off multisampling before starting the movie and back on when the movie is finished.
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Post by Bill Mueller on Jan 8, 2008 20:44:06 GMT -5
stargraser,
I apologize for not answering sooner. I hope that we can give you a better answer tomorrow as well. As far as I know, issues like this are almost always video card drivers. Check to see if your driver is updated, or if you have the latest update, you might need to roll back one version. Also, while we have played the game on Vista and not seen any problems so far, we have not tested it on every combination of Vista, DirectX and video cards.
Best Regards,
Bill
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Post by stargrazer on Jan 9, 2008 21:13:58 GMT -5
Thanks Bill,
I was thinking along similar lines, but probably more towards DirectX 10.0. Forceware 169.25 dates to 12/20 and is the most up to date. The other version I have available is 163.75. I can experiment with this to see if it makes a difference (but not tonight).
I don't know if there is even a way to run the the previous version of DirectX with my video card.
BTW, the graphics look really great at 8X multisampling and 1920 by 1200 resolution.
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Post by Bill Mueller on Jan 9, 2008 23:04:33 GMT -5
stargrazer,
I will try to get more info for you tomorrow, but you might be right about the DirectX issue.
Wow, I have to admit that I have never seen the game at 8X multisampling and 1920 X 1200 resolution! I'll bet the hard edges of the modules clean right up!
Best Regards,
Bill
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Post by stargrazer on Jan 20, 2008 22:10:06 GMT -5
I finally got around to trying to roll back the Nvidia driver. I only have the immediately previous version. Unfortunately, it did not make any difference. I also did a couple of Windows hot fixes the Nvidia recommended, some pertaining to DX10 issues. Some of the hot fixes had not been installed previously by Windows update, but others had. I guess that I had assumed that Windows update would have taken care of all of these. Unfortunately these did not make a difference either.
In the mean time, the game works just fine with multisampling turned off and videos turned on or vice versa.
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Post by Greg Beauchesne on Jan 21, 2008 9:57:22 GMT -5
Enabling multisampling reserves additional memory on the graphics card for the multisampling effect. Does the problem still occur with lower screen resolutions?
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Post by stargrazer on Jan 21, 2008 21:41:13 GMT -5
I tried at several reduced resolutions down to 848x480 @ 16bpp. the problem persisted in all cases. I don't think that memory would be a problem, the 8600 GTS comes with 256 MB of DDR3. The card's system information indicates that the card can also share up to 766 MB of system memory. Unfortunately NVmonitor will not stay on top when running the game, but running the game for a brief time at maximum settings did not show any significant increase in system memory usage and only a slight increase in GPU temperature.
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Post by Greg Beauchesne on Jan 22, 2008 17:00:17 GMT -5
Hmm. I'm not sure what it would be, then. Unfortunately, shutting off multisampling before the movies and turning it back on again is not that simple. Enabling multisampling is considered a different graphics mode (probably since it has to reserve additional graphics card memory, as I mentioned above). We would have to dump all of the game's graphical resources, change the mode, and reload them again, but SpaceStationSim is not currently set up to do this.
The only other thing I can think of is that multisampling mode on your card has some kind of conflict with video overlays, which is what SpaceStationSim uses to play videos. If your graphics card setup has any options related to video overlays, you may want to try tweaking them.
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Post by stargrazer on Jan 22, 2008 18:26:18 GMT -5
Thanks Greg,
That explains it. As an end user, there is no way for me to know what mechanisms a software product uses to accomplish a given task or the proprietary internals of the device driver.
The following is extracted from Nvidia's release notes for Forceware 169.25 available on their website. (There is more, but I just grabbed the relevant item.)
"Unsupported Features
The following are features and functionality that were available in driver releases supporting Windows XP, but are not–and will not be–available in driver releases for Windows Vista:
• Video Overlays
This is an operating system limitation. Vista window manager features will provide new ways of accomplishing overlays, but will require application porting."
If other Vista users have not encountered this problem, this is probably due to them not having tried multisampling. Let's consider this matter closed for now and leave it as a heads up for you to consider for future development targeted at Vista.
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Post by Bill Mueller on Jan 22, 2008 19:03:18 GMT -5
Hello stargrazer,
I'm a bit confused now.
I run the game all the time with no problems, on a Dell laptop running an NVIDEA GForce4 4200 video card and Vista with multisampling ON. I do run the MPEG movies though.
I think there may be something else going on here even though MS says video overlays are not supported in Vista.
Bill
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Post by stargrazer on Jan 23, 2008 18:33:23 GMT -5
Well, Nvidia says Vista, but my guess is that the real issue is DX10. SpaceStationSim says that it requires DX 9, so I assume that is what you are running on your 4200. DX10 requires hardware that supports it, like a Geforce 8. A lot of the DX functions are now apparently done in hardware. I don't know what version of DX would work when running an 8 series card under XP.
I know that when I upgraded my card from a 7300 LE to the 8600 GTS, I didn't have to do anything to upgrade from DX9 to 10. It was just there. I assume Vista comes with both.
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Post by stargrazer on Jan 23, 2008 18:56:12 GMT -5
Sorry, I forgot to mention one thing. On Microsoft's web site where they have a section on Vista SP1, they talk about D3D 10.1.
"Adds support for Direct3D® 10.1, an update to Direct3D 10 that extends the API to support new hardware features, enabling 3D application and game developers to make more complete and efficient use of the upcoming generations of graphics hardware. "
The way they phrase this, I am not positive that my 8600 GTS will support 10.1.
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Post by neodeath on Apr 17, 2009 14:00:48 GMT -5
If got the same Problem. My system config: Vista Ultimate x86, DX 10, Geforce 8800 GT. Someone there who has handled this Problem?
Sorry for my bad english (Germany)
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Post by neodeath on Apr 17, 2009 16:31:13 GMT -5
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