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)
I was exploring a terra moon (the one around Tau Ceti 5), and I found an island. The first time I went there, the soil of the beach vas blue itself,
and the color dissepeared when I went close, as the underwater fog started above the water layer. And, during loading, the water layer teleported 20 meters above, and it remains an underwater region near the coast, without fog.
This is the same sight, after the water moved.
Also, there are no difference between specular reflection on land and water on this planet :
The reason is: Dedicated VRAM: 2048 Mb (from main.cfg)
You have to reduce the VideoMemoryMaxPercent from 100 (or 95%) to something around 75% from main.cfg located in config folder of your SE install. SE can not use more than 2GB of VRAM plus 2GB of main RAM anyway as it is a 32bit app. Also windows needs some VRAM left for its own GUI.
Hi, I'm having a sad time with 0.9.7.1 crashing after only a few minutes, sometimes seconds, of play :-(
Have tried the usual: LoaderMode 1, turn off or down Nebulae, 3D Water, Terrain LOD, hard set VRAM 1.5Gb, clearing Cache folder between retries. Was a fresh install into C:\Games\ folder.
My setup: NVIDIA Quadro K5000 GPU (w/ 4GB VRAM GDDR5), Intel Xeon CPU E31240/3.3GHz, 8GB RAM, Windows 7 Enterprise/64 (SE crashes similarly when booting a Win7/32 disk).
Space Engine 0.9.6 was fairly stable, 0.9.7 less so, 0.9.7.1 is just upsetting me!
se.log attached from a crash after starting and immediately doing a GoTo Earth, SE crashes reliably mid star field flight.
background: Hoping to use SE on a projection wall at my university's small observatory - currently Microsoft Worldwide Telescope is the winner for stability.
Note to mods - may I suggest separating "crash reports" into a topic away from general troubleshooting and "this don't look right" bug reports.
I have a clean install of version 0.9.7.1 and I'm getting strange cloud pop-in, which sometimes happen with land, and the water seems to glitch out on some planets as well. This doesn't happen with all planets, which is strange, but it is there.
I should note that I'm using a dedicated AMD graphics card which I know have had issues with SpaceEngine before, but again, it only happens on some planets. (I think I've seen it with previous versions as well, but not to this extent.)
The issue with the water is normal; that's just z-fighting and some issues related to oceania planets in this version. As for the clouds, it looks like clipping through the landscape due to being generated with too low a height, so they intersect with terrain. Again, not a glitch.
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 reason is: Dedicated VRAM: 2048 Mb (from main.cfg)
You have to reduce the VideoMemoryMaxPercent from 100 (or 95%) to something around 75% from main.cfg located in config folder of your SE install. SE can not use more than 2GB of VRAM plus 2GB of main RAM anyway as it is a 32bit app. Also windows needs some VRAM left for its own GUI.
Thank you! I set it to 60. Now when it reaches 2GB it just slows down a bit in high speed areas. Crashes are gone +1 !
Hi, In my crash se.log's the last activity always seems to be nebulae related.
Disabling BOTH catalog and procedural Nebulae appears to help with MY 0.9.7.1 crashing problem. I've been able to play for about 10minutes now without a crash. Disabling just Procedural Nebulae didn't help. My guess is the thing which draws nebulae is broken on my system.
Simply un-ticking Nebulae in Settings>Graphics>Skybox/Impostors/FB didn't help.
Hi, In my crash se.log's the last activity always seems to be nebulae related
Hi alfski, it would be actually useful if you could post your se.log. You can include it by clicking the [+] sign next to Attachments (found below the message field that you are typing) and browsing to your SEfolder\system\
Space engine freezes inside starclusters or dwarf galaxys (E type galaxys)
with freeze i mean, that first the fps falls to 0, then the sound starts looping and a few sec later i get a white screen with the message "3D spase simulator not responding", appearing and disappearing in an endless loop, i have to close it by taskmanagar.
i already updated sound and graphic drivers, but i see no changes and my computer is very strong.
im not sure, if it generates a log for crashes like this one
this version only crashed in planet editor and nowhere else in game, but now it starts freezing in starclusters and dwarf galaxys.
Hi, I'm having a sad time with 0.9.7.1 crashing after only a few minutes, sometimes seconds, of play :-( Have tried the usual: LoaderMode 1, turn off or down Nebulae, 3D Water, Terrain LOD, hard set VRAM 1.5Gb, clearing Cache folder between retries. Was a fresh install into C:\Games\ folder.
SE crashes while generating nebulae models in asynchronous loading mode. You may simply disable nebulae (in view settings, as you do), but you may also generate them all in interleaved loading mode. Set LoadingMode 1 in the main.cfg, then fly through all nebulae models (look for names in models/nebulae/models.cfg) until all models generated, then exit SE ans switch back to asynchronous mode. Do not delete cache before each launch! Cache is not a temporary folder for a garbage, SE saves many platform-specific things there to speedup loading, such as galaxy/nebula model and drawing shaders code.
I wonder if there is a parameter that can reduce the max.number of simultaneously rendered nebulas
Yes, a parameter of this kind would be really useful in those circumstances!
Quoteneutronium76 ()
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: Attachments: Models.cfg(42Kb)
Thanks. Actually, this helps a bit. However, it seems that something has changed in the graphics engine, because, in similar conditions (for instance, 90 diffuse nebulae around, in a sector of M31), with SE 0.9.7.0 I get ~ 18 fps, instead using 0.9.7.1 I get ~ 10 fps (@ 1920x1200).
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? Anyway, с новым годом, Владимир!
Yes, probably it is a "true" bug. And спасибо!
QuoteZatSolo ()
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
Yes... There may be 2 other solutions, not affecting universe.cfg:
1) Enable more impostors by increasing TRMaxImpostors in main.cfg. Nebulae that are in medium distances are rendered in a textures (impostors) and these textures are drawn instead of nebulae models. This increases performance. But it should be noted that impostors required a lot VRAM, so if you have 1024 or less, do not do it. And this probably didn't help with 140+ nebulae - you can't use such huge number of impostors. Edit: Also you may enable second skybox to use for nebula, when camera is inside it. It consumes some VRAM and may cause graphical artifacts (box edges may be visible). But increasing of performance inside a nebula is huge!
2) Reduce LODbase for models that are used for procedural nebulae (ie which have UseForType "Diffuse" parameter) in the models/nebulae/models.cfg script. Default value 10 means that model detail level start reduced from distance of 10 nebula radii. Decreasing it twice may solves the issue. Edit: I found a problem with models M16, Diff5, and Carina - they have huge LODbase = 50. Changing LODbase to 5 for all diffuse nebulae increases FPS twice. You should delete the cache/models/nebulae folder after editing the models script.
3) And third method - reduce detail of some huge nebulae models, as was suggested before.
Edit2: I may add a Nebula LOD slider in the graphics settings in the next patch.
Yes... There may be 2 other solutions, not affecting universe.cfg:
1) Enable more impostors by increasing TRMaxImpostors in main.cfg. Nebulae that are in medium distances are rendered in a textures (impostors) and these textures are drawn instead of nebulae models. This increases performance. But it should be noted that impostors required a lot VRAM, so if you have 1024 or less, do not do it. And this probably didn't help with 140+ nebulae - you can't use such huge number of impostors. Edit: Also you may enable second skybox to use for nebula, when camera is inside it. It consumes some VRAM and may cause graphical artifacts (box edges may be visible). But increasing of performance inside a nebula is huge!
2) Reduce LODbase for models that are used for procedural nebulae (ie which have UseForType "Diffuse" parameter) in the models/nebulae/models.cfg script. Default value 10 means that model detail level start reduced from distance of 10 nebula radii. Decreasing it twice may solves the issue. Edit: I found a problem with models M16, Diff5, and Carina - they have huge LODbase = 50. Changing LODbase to 5 for all diffuse nebulae increases FPS twice. You should delete the cache/models/nebulae folder after editing the models script.
3) And third method - reduce detail of some huge nebulae models, as was suggested before.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts on this Vladimir! I will try them as soon as I get back from work tonight
QuoteSpaceEngineer ()
I may add a Nebula LOD slider in the graphics settings in the next patch
ENG
New site
Russian Federation 
France 
Canada 
Greece 
Australia 
United States 
Switzerland 
Italy 
