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DirectX 8 Flickering & Lighting

by Jay Barnson · in Torque Game Engine · 05/14/2009 (3:33 pm) · 4 replies

I'm experiencing some issues with flickering - particularly UI elements - under both my modified TGE project, as well as in the basic TGE demo (hard to find these days, I know...). This has been a problem for a while. I couldn't get a screenshot of it, and I tried to shut VerticaSyncDisabled off in the preferences, but the problem remains.

I've heard others complain about this, but I've never seen a fix. Has anybody found the magic changes in the wrapper to fix this problem?

This is not a problem under OpenGL, just DirectX. Unfortunately, especially for Vista users, restricting it to OpenGL isn't a viable answer...

I'm also getting some objects lit differently under DirectX than in OpenGL. I suspect I may just be exporting things with some kind of wrong material settings, and that the issue just doesn't show up under OGL. Any ideas?

Thanks!
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Torque 3D Owner Jay Barnson

About the author

Jay has been a mainstream and indie game developer for a... uh, long time. His professional start came in 1994 developing titles for the then-unknown and upcoming Sony Playstation. He runs Rampant Games and blogs at Tales of the Rampant Coyote.

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    Associate Michael Hall
    Distracted...
    #1
    05/15/2009 (12:39 am)
    Sorry to say it, but DirectX mode in TGE has always been a poor choice and never was given proper support.

    There were/are some terrain/lighting flickering issues which I know of (depending on video card) that could be circumvented by disabling detailTexture and/or bumpmapping for the terrain -- but I've never experienced any flickering of GUI objects.

    Out of my own curiosity what about Vista prevents you from using OpenGL?
    i167.photobucket.com/albums/u143/heretek/torque/Untitled-1.png

    Torque 3D Owner Jay Barnson
    #2
    05/15/2009 (1:11 am)
    Nothing's preventing me - I'm still using XP. But some of my users are running Vista, and there have been a couple of them who've been experiencing problems running under OpenGL. I don't know many more details.

    I'll see about disabling detail textures.

    Yeah, the DirectX thing was always a disappointment to me. I kept expecting that GG was on top of it, and the next release would miraculously have a bunch of DirectX bugs nuked. Ah, well.

    Any ideas on the lighting issues on Blender-exported objects?

    Associate Michael Hall
    Distracted...
    #3
    05/15/2009 (5:36 am)
    Anytime that I see problems with lighting on models (Blender exported ones in general) it seems to usually be bad normals (facing the wrong way) or somehow the double sided option gets turned on.

    Torque 3D Owner Jay Barnson
    #4
    05/15/2009 (8:22 am)
    Oh, bingo! The normals are correct, but Blender likes to set up all models as double-sided turned on by default, and I sometimes forget to fix those. Thanks, Michael!