Game Development Community

SgDecalProjector and Quadro FX cards

by James Spellman · in · 07/25/2007 (11:42 am) · 2 replies

We just added some sgDecalProjector objects to my TGE 1.5.2 mission. Two of my testers are crashing when it attempts to render the scene containing the decals. The only obvious difference between them and the other testers is that they're using Quardo FX cards (540 and 1400). They're using Forceware drivers 93.71 and 91.63 respectively.

I assume that there's some capability that's missing from these cards or something else of an obvious nature, but I wanted to get this out there in case anyone had a comment or idea.

Thanks!

#1
07/26/2007 (12:45 pm)
TGE's decals use alpha and additive blending, which should be standard on all cards. Try running the engine in debug mode on one of the test machines to see where it crashes, that should help identify what's going on. Also make sure the tester is running TGE in OpenGL mode (the DirectX wrapper supports decals, but *might* act weird depending on the drivers).
#2
07/26/2007 (1:54 pm)
Aye. I'm sure we're in OpenGL mode. Unfortunately the machines in question are in another state.

We did some old fashion logging and it's happening in the second block of the loop where it's checking for self-illumination. I didn't go any further than that. It's not happening on the first frame either. It runs for several ticks before crashing. Oddly, the stock 1.5.2 demo does not seem to crash but another project of mine did seem to after a few seconds.

The only thing I saw that looked odd was the glDepthMask seems to be turned on/off twice as many times as it needs to, but I know next to nothing about OpenGL, so maybe it's normal. I also can't say I understand the algorithm that well. Neither it nor it's 1.5 predecessor are rich in comments. I did revert us back to the 1.5 version for now and it seems to be working well.

I'll try to get my hands on one of those cards on my next trip to California and see if I can find out more then.

Oh, and we were using a mixture of three decals, one illuminated, with about 20 instances in all with a perm lifespan.