Please post here all of your reports about bugs or crashes in SpaceEngine. Before you post any bugs, please follow these steps:
Read the Fixing common issues section below. It is possible that your problem can be solved there.
Read the List of known issues section below and make sure that your bugs are not on in it. You can use your browser's word finder to help search the list.
If the bug is not on the list then please post it in this thread. Attach to your message a screenshot (if possible) and a log file (it's called the se.log and is located in the SpaceEngine/system/ directory). Only the log file will help me to understand your problem and find a solution!
Fixing common issues
1) Obsolete or incompatible drivers These are the most frequent errors found in SE. You will get a popup window with one of these following messages:
- "You have old OpenGL version (2.1.1). Update your graphics card driver or install compatible hardware"
- "You have old GLSL version (1.2). Update your graphics card driver or install compatible hardware"
- "Error loading surface generator shaders. Press YES to run program with procedural planets disabled. Press NO to exit"
Download and install latest drivers for your video card. If you still get this message, it could be that you have an incompatible video card (see next paragraph).
[CRITICAL NOTE] Some recent NVidia drivers are incompatible with SE. Symptoms are flashing planet images on the screen when you open the F2 menu (see the spoiler), missing lens flares, grayed out options for HDR and FXAA in the Graphics settings menu, and other glitches. The errors in the se.log are look like this:
Code
Loading shader "system/shaders/hdr_down4.glsl" 0(4) : error C7621: #extension directive must occur before any non-preprocessor token 0(4) : error C7621: #extension directive must occur before any non-preprocessor token ERROR: Vertex info ----------- 0(4) : error C7621: #extension directive must occur before any non-preprocessor token
Fragment info ------------- 0(4) : error C7621: #extension directive must occur before any non-preprocessor token
If you have run into these problems, update to at least 344.65, or roll back to earlier than 337.xx.
But you still can try and run SpaceEngine by disabling checking of critical errors at startup. Open main.cfg and change value of this parameter to 'true':
IgnoreCriticalCheck true // ignore checking of OpenGL version and critical extensions supporting
NOTE: I can give no guaranties that SpaceEngine will be stable and work correctly if you do make this change.
If you have an "Error loading surface generator shaders" error and press Yes, SpaceEngine can run, but it will not be able to render procedural planetary landscapes.
After updating or rollback of the drivers, you must delete the cache folder in the SpaceEngine directory.
2) Weak system Most of the forum posts I receive are from users that report an inability to start SpaceEngine, This is because those users have inbuilt Intel graphics card, or some old GeForce 5700 series, or not a proper "gaming" laptop. There is no way but to update your hardware system. There are no plans to make a second version of the engine for weaker systems with simplified graphics, CPU texture generation, etc. It would be like coding another engine from scratch. Once again, I would remind everyone that the minimum system requirements can be found on the Home page, but I will mention it here as well:
CPU 2.0 GHz RAM 2 Gb Video GeForce 8600, Radeon HD 2600 vRAM 512 Mb
I stress that the special role played by videocard onboard memory (vRAM). 512 MB is the absolute minimum. The engine uses a large amount of data that must be in video memory (textures, meshes, vbo, etc). If your system meets the recommended requirements, the engine will work, because its development is made for this hardware:
CPU 3.0 GHz RAM 4 Gb Video GeForce 9800 GTX, ATI Mobility HD 5730 vRAM 1024 Mb
You can try to start the engine with some OpenGL extensions disabed, if your hardware does not support them: frame buffer objects (FBO), half floats, float textures and 3D textures. Information about this is written at the beginning of the log (SpaceEngine/system/se.log), after the list of extensions:
If the log reads 'unsupported, then the extension is not supported and the engine will disable itself. If it seems to support float and 3D textures, but the atmosphere of planets has some monstrous bottleneck, such as the GeForce 6200 and GeForce 6600, then it is best to disable those extensions forcibly. This is done in the file config/main.cfg:
Reference: - The Milky Way and other nearby galaxies and nebulae use FBO. HDR rendering mode also use FBO. Disabling it disables the 3D models of galaxies and nebulae, and disables HDR mode. - Atmospheres using float and 3D textures. Disabling any of them disables the atmosphere. HDR rendering mode uses a float textures, disabling them disables HDR. - Shader binary cache reduces lags on loading shaders. Works normally on NVidia, onr ATI and Intel it disabled automatically after first laubch of SpaceEngine.
If you have a Intel HD graphics card, it is better to disable asynchronous loading in the main.cfg as well:
3) System with hybrid graphics (NVidia/ATI + Intel HD) If you're running SE on a laptop with dual graphics, make sure SE runs on NVidia or ATI chip instead of Intel HD. You may see it in the beginning of "SpaceEngine/system/se.log" file. If it says: Vendor: Intel Renderer: Intel® HD Graphics 4000
then you should open NVidia Control Panel or ATI Catalyst and force SpaceEngine.exe run on NVidia/ATI graphics card. If you do not found SpaceEngine profile there, create a new one.
4) Crashing in the interstellar or intergalactic space or after appearing of the nebula in the view field If you open the "SpaceEngine/system/se.log" file after a crash, and it ends up with line like this:
Creating nebula model "cache/models/nebulae/M42.nm",
then try to disable asynchronous loading of a resources. Open the file config/main.cfg with the Notepad and change this parameter to 1:
After that, delete the cache folder from the SpaceEngine directory. Performance will drop while flying between a stars and galaxies, but stability may be improved. After a while, all models of galaxies and nebulae a being be generated, and you may enable asynchronous loading back (set up LoaderMode 2).
5) Spaceship disappear when far from a star It is not a bug. Current version have not yet completed spaceships rendering system - they cannot be rendered if there is no stars or planets in the renderlist. Just imagine that ship becomes invisible in interstellar flight
6) Blurry textures on Solar system planets It is not a bug. Our Solar system planets (Mercury, Venus, Earth, Moon, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and its satellites) have no procedural textures, only real ones with limited level-of-detail. You can download addons with high resolution textures to increase level of detail of real planets.
7) Artifacts on procedural planets If you get missing landscape blocks, blurry or blinking textures, random spikes sticking out of surface, check out these recommendations here:
a) If you have a laptop with hybrid graphics, read the paragraph 3.
b) Make sure that you make a "clean" installation of SE. If you install a new version overwriting the old one, you may get many bugs and glitches. If you get some glitches after the patch is installed, remove the folder called cache from SpaceEngine's directory.
c) If this does not help, read the paragraph 8.
8) Frequent crashing while generating planetary surface If you have frequent crashes on planets, or get an "OUT OF MEMORY" message on screen, or "Unexpected deleting of child node" in the log file, try taking these steps first:
Close any other programs that can consume the video memory (games, video players, graphics editors, etc.). SpaceEngine is not a small flash type game, video memory is the most important resource for it. It may help to disable the Windows Aero theme too, as it consumes a lot of video memory.
Disable "3D water" in Graphics settings (Ctrl-F4)
Reduce "Landscape LOD" to -2 in Graphics settings (Ctrl+F4)
Set up the amount of video memory in the main.cfg file:
VideoMemorySize 2048 // video card onboard memory (VRAM) in megabytes
The value must not be less than 1024, but not more than the total amount of physical video memory plus amount of RAM. For example, if you have a graphics card with 1024 MB of video memory, and more than 2 GB of RAM, you can increase VideoMemorySize to 2048.
List of known issues
Green items have been fixed for the next release
Not real bugs, but effects caused by limitations in the engine: - Ships do not render in interstellar space - Star catalog has many errors in star classification, so there are many "giant dwarfs" and "dwarf giants" - Many real binary stars rendered as single, and many single rendered as binary - SE simply have incomplete catalog of binary stars - An unwanted star (sprite) is visible in the barycenter of a binary star from distance greater than 0.01 pc - Comet nucleus star-sprite will shine through planets [example]. - Galaxy/nebula sprites will rotate when seen from certain angles - Auroras, comet tails and rings can be rendered in front of ships/moons sometimes - Lens flares are distorted by gravitational lensing (black holes and ship warp drive effect) - Text editor for Wiki descriptions is not working - it is not implemented yet - Solar system moons don't have extremely accurate orbits (requires implementation of custom orbit models, e.g. VSOP-87) - Sunspot distribution is not always realistic - Ocean tag not yet implemented in planet editor - Rounding errors (e.g. 30° in catalog rounds to 29°59'59.99" displayed on HUD) - Ship retro engines have not been implemented yet
Real bugs: - Too many planets with life (panspermia issue) - Oceanias have landscapes above water - Several bugs with the planet editor - Changing "modes" between simulation and orbital when piloting ships can cause glitches - Few issues with asynchronous loading (stars don't always generate properly, especially when flying to new galaxies) - Holes in some giant stars when camera is directly above a very tall spot[example] - Flashing landscape LOD on a planet when Wiki for it is displayed - Star clusters not displayed in Wiki - GUI response issues with some users (interface items glitchy or not respond easily) - GUI toolbars may completely disappear when pressing pin button while half-hidden - Deep space objects (e.g. stars, galaxies) will shine through planets when HDR for DSO is off, but HDR is on and Bloom is on [example] - Some neutron stars can have very low temperatures[example] - Flickering flare color in close binary systems [example] - Auto-exposure does not react when a sun is blocked while diffraction spikes are set to normal or super - Planet rings have an unrealistic color palette - "Eclipse bug" on distant planets (weird dark shimmering on outer planet caused by inner planet crossing the sun or two suns eclipsing) - Cloud cyclones have cut edges sometimes - Level horizon command (End key) doesn't work properly on oblate objects - Problems when releasing Left + Right click - Lines or junctures are visible on planetary surface - Switching to fullscreen doesn't work sometimes - Weird behavior of movement keys in tracking mode (T) and after releasing it - Automatic reference object setting with spacecraft doesn't always choose the best object (for example, when near dwarf moons or debris asteroids close to a planet you are trying to orbit) - 3D water fog sometimes starts above the water surface - Problems with the skybox export interface, and with the planetarium after using it, for some users - Music player will unpause when SE window is minimized and restored, or when entering and exiting the main menu - If a galaxy model is selected, the camera is not following any object, and the program is in Edit Mode, closing and restarting the program will cause the WASDRF movement keys to behave incorrectly until the camera is set to follow an object - "Crop orbits" in the Map mode doesn't work - Spaceship and lens flare textures do not load when loader mode is set to "Immediate" - Visual atmosphere heights are inconsistently and unrealistically generated - Physical atmosphere properties are inconsistently and unrealistically generated, and are not tied to the visual models - Dwarf moons can be generated on colliding orbits - Moons are never generated with retrograde orbits - Bugs with the surfaces of carbon stars and zirconium stars - Cyclones are not generated in the southern hemispheres of gas giants - Sometimes, worlds which are too small are classed as "selena" when they should be classed as asteroid - Shimmering bloom splotch when very close to the surface of a planet [example] - CW/CCW rotation keys for ship in atmosphere are reversed - Mouse axis inversion settings for spaceship controls are not saved - Z faces are switched when exporting skyboxes (pos_Z is really neg_Z)
"Loadlibrary failed with error 998: invalid access to memory location."
the attached file is my specs, I use the hd5400 graphic card Attachments: BIGRED-PC.txt(90Kb)
solved it myself, I had a driver conflict. two amd card drivers were trying to run at the same time ( I think) I had to uninstall both and update to the latest driver
as far as I'm concerned, the only thing I think is not quite right in these worlds is when they don't have a layer of craters partially obliterating the base orography.
Yes, I agree with you, more craters would make the realism even better.
That aside, I think the classification of this kind of bodies (diameter between 350/300 and 200 Km) should be "cool/frozen asteroid", not "cool selena" or "ice world". Hyperion, ~ 340 Km diameter, is classified as "frozen asteroid".
Anyway, SE 0.9.7.1 is A W E S O M E Thanks to Vladimir
Yes, true, even using NebulaDiffDensity 0.5 the performance goes better
You must either have a really powerful machine or SE magically behaves better for you because for me 0.5 is still as bad as default 1.5 . The only other solution is to start messing around with nebula model.cfg and tweak some values of ''Diff1'' through ''Diff5'' but I really don't know what to adjust. Help from the Master or from his best students would be greatly appreciated One other thing is that M31/Andromeda has traditionally been a very crowded galaxy on previous versions of SE. I believe there must be a way to reduce the load/clutter even on other procedural galaxies at certain areas close to the galactic core
I don't know if this is a bug but I noticed that when you set auto exposure to on, the lens flare ghosts disappear: With auto exposure off: With Auto-exposure On:
PS: I intentionally increased the difraction spikes size in order to see if lens flare ghosts will reappear but they didn't..
I don't know if this is a bug but I noticed that when you set auto exposure to on, the lens flare ghosts disappear:
This is not a bug... the strength of the ghosts depends on the brightness of the light source and the exposure settings of the camera. If you make the picture darker, the ghosts become less visible. Perhaps their brightness relative to the diffraction spikes is not the most realistic in SE, but it's certainly not a bug.
All forum users, please read this! My SE mods and addons Phenom II X6 1090T 3.2 GHz, 16 GB DDR3 RAM, GTX 970 3584 MB VRAM
The "star shining through planet" bug is still here (and it isn't listed on the known issues list... unless that's part of the "Comet nucleus star-sprite will shine through planets" limitation... it does look similar). Here's an example of it. This is a very small dwarf planet in one of my systems, a quadruple star system. It's lit by the star it revolves around (a white dwarf), and those two orange spots on the dark area in its right are two of the other stars (both, I think, red dwarfs).
This is not a bug. Lens flares of stars are switched to simplified version for very big distances. They didn't take into account a shape of occluding body.
QuoteBigRedforester ()
when I try to run the program I get this error "Loadlibrary failed with error 998: invalid access to memory location." the attached file is my specs, I use the hd5400 graphic card
You have broken video drivers. Try to remove them with program called "Display Driver Uninstaller", and perform a clean new installation.
QuoteSaaan ()
When changing the sea level, i dont see any changes on the wather
seaLevel is internal variable used by planets with seas, or bottom level of mare on selena and ice world. Real water level cannot be changed with the editor in this version (sorry, I have rushed the release a lot, and simply has no time to do that).
QuoteJCandeias ()
Speaking of the planet editor, for me the thing is even more drastic. As soon as I click on anything, the planet I'm trying to edit simply vanishes. The info is still there (although sometimes rather nonsensical: asteroids tend for some reason to "gain" extremely thin atmospheres, for instance), but the planet isn't.
Unpause the time. There is a precision loss for orbital parameters in the editor.
QuoteZatSolo ()
Yes, true, even using NebulaDiffDensity 0.5 the performance goes better. Thanks. Anyway .... SE 0.9.7.0 in the same condition works good. Why? Bug or changes in nebula models or .... ???
Maybe some of new Voekoevaka's nebula models are just too heavy, I didn't check it. You may make a research: find a very low-fps nebula, select it, enter Debug mode by pressing * key, and look at its model name. Then open models/nebulae/models.cfg, find this model, and reduce emDetail / absDetail parameters. Save the config, enter Edit mode (press * again) and update the nebula model (Ctrl-Shift-F5). Or exit SE, delete the model from cache/models/nebulae, and run SE again.
One of the worst ones is the Carina nebula model, I lose over 30 fps when that nebula is on screen
It's not the nebula itself, it's the fact that there are multiple nebulae there so you're forced to render more than one. Just remove the subnebulae (Keyhole Nebula, etc).
All forum users, please read this! My SE mods and addons Phenom II X6 1090T 3.2 GHz, 16 GB DDR3 RAM, GTX 970 3584 MB VRAM
Edited by HarbingerDawn - Tuesday, 31.12.2013, 18:36
No need to do that. I reduced the abs and emdetail a while ago, both to 0.5 and now I don't lose any fps. Was simply saying that by default the Carina nebula is one of the worst offenders.
Intel Core i7-5820K 4.2GHz 6-Core Processor G.Skill Ripjaws V Series 32GB (4 x 8GB) DDR4-2400 Memory EVGA GTX 980 Ti SC 6GB
This is not a bug. Lens flares of stars are switched to simplified version for very big distances. They didn't take into account a shape of occluding body.
Hm... I confess I don't fully understand the difference between bugs (i.e., things not working properly because of errors in the program) and limitations (i.e., things not working properly because of... well... limitations). Still, if that's a case of simplified lens flare, then (if I understood correctly how flares behave) it shouldn't detect shape and therefore shine through topographical highs, but should not shine through the base sphere of the body. Only it does. You can see that at least the point closest to the planet's center is very much within the base sphere (and I think the outer one is too, but I won't guarantee), and in any case I've checked when this happens: they do shine through the whole body, not just its topographic highs.
Couldn't this be a case of a bug desguised as a limitation?
... You may make a research: find a very low-fps nebula, select it, enter Debug mode by pressing * key, and look at its model name. Then open models/nebulae/models.cfg, find this model, and reduce emDetail / absDetail parameters ...
All the nebulae are "simply" diffuse. The problem appears when there are a lot of nebulae around, not a single custom nebula model. With the "Carina nebula" I get, @ 1920x1200, ~ 20 fps
In this image, if I read correctly what the debugger shows, there are 142 nebulae around rendered. This causes a drastic drop in performances (3/4 fps). I got 142 nebulae using a resolution of 1920x1200 pixels and the parameter "NebulaDiffDensity" @ 1.5 (default).
In that area of space (a sector of M31) the density of nebulae is really too high. Here the coords:
Code
Place "Nebulae in M31 at 4fps" { Body "RS 1186-1828-6-77044-28" Parent "" Pos (0.3891092143827709, -2.469666557937173, 36.76986010809348) Rot (0.4526038810612625, -0.1133071487949698, -0.0524188126080537, -0.8829289240731661) Date "2013.09.16 08:32:04.73" Vel 0.21258333 Mode 1 }
The problem appears when there are a lot of nebulae around, not a single custom nebula mode
QuoteZatSolo ()
there are 142 nebulae around rendered. This causes a drastic drop in performances (3/4 fps). I got 142 nebulae using a resolution of 1920x1200 pixels and the parameter "NebulaDiffDensity" @ 1.5 (default)
QuoteZatSolo ()
In that area of space (a sector of M31) the density of nebulae is really too high
My thoughts exactly! I wonder if there is a parameter that can reduce the max.number of simultaneously rendered nebulas. Maybe this can be xtrapolated and apply to simultaneously rendered xyz object(s) .
Anyway below I quote my modified nebula model.cfg in case someone wants to use it or modify it further. With this modifications I get a 50%-100% increase in fps which translates to 4-6 fps in M31s most crowded space:
The Earth's atmospheric pressure lowers far too slowly as you rise in the atmosphere. At 50 kilometres height, there's still half a bar of pressure left. At 140, 10% of sea level pressure. The atmosphere starts at a little over 300 km.
ENG
New site
Russian Federation 
United States 
Italy 
Greece 
. The only other solution is to start messing around with nebula model.cfg and tweak some values of ''Diff1'' through ''Diff5'' but I really don't know what to adjust. Help from the Master or from his best students would be greatly appreciated 
Croatia 
Pirate 
Portugal 
Antarctica 
