Please post here all of your reports about bugs or crashes in SpaceEngine. Before you post any bugs, please follow these steps:
First of all, make sure you make a clean install of SpaceEngine and update your video card drivers. This may solve 99% of all isues.
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 us to understand your problem and find a solution!
Fixing videocard-specific issues
If you do not know which videocard do you have, open the system/se.log file in the text editor and read the Vendor information in the beginning:
INITIALIZING OPENGL [MT] Vendor: ATI Technologies Inc.
Then look for a solution for you:
Nvidia: Major lag spikes
To prevent major lags with Nvidia, go into Nvidia control panel, and in SpaceEngine's profile set Threaded optimization to off.
ATI/AMD: Transparent or invisible planets, no landscape
ATI/AMD: Crash on approaching to the black hole, neutron star or white dwarf, on using ship's hyperdrive, or when enabling the Oculus Rift mode or the Fish Eye mode
First, try the solution in in the previous paragraph. If this didn't help, open config/user.cfg and change this parameter value to false, so that it looks like this:
EnableMipmapsWarp false // use mipmapping for warp effects rendering
If crashes on enabling the Oculus Rift mode or the Fish Eye mode still remains, change these two parameters to false as well:
EnableMipmapsGUI false // use mipmapping for GUI FBO EnableMipmapsFrame false // use mipmapping for scene FBO
Intel HD: Glitchy landscape and textures on planets
Open config/main.cfg and change this parameter to 13:
PlanetHeightmapFormat 13 // format of the terrain heightmap textures: 13 - R32F, 16 - RGBA32F
If this didn't help, open config/user.cfg and change this parameter to true:
- "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).
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 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
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) 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 item #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.
5) 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.
6) Spaceship disappears 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
7) 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.
8) Crash on entering the Display menu
If you experience a crash when trying to open the Display menu, open config/main.cfg and change the Maximized parameter value to true, so that it looks like this:
Maximized true // start with a maximized window
9) Problems with very high resolution displays
If you're using a very high display resolution and have problems selecting things with the cursor, or your screenshots are being output at a lower resolution than you're using, try the following:
1) Open Windows Control Panel, navigate to Display, and set the DPI scaling to "Smaller - 100% (default)" - it should look like this.
2) If you want to adjust the DPI scaling, click on "Set custom text size (DPI)" in the sidebar and change its value to suit your preference.
List of known issues
Green items have been fixed for the next release
Not real bugs, but effects caused by limitations in the engine:
- Star mode "points" and "sprites" looks the same. This is right! This switch changes the rendering technology, not the visual appearance. - 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 - Comet nucleus star-sprite will shine through planets [example]. - Galaxy/nebula sprites will rotate when seen from certain angles - Skybox edges are visible when near the center of galaxy - 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) - "Normal" autoexposure mode is unfinished - Bloom effects from the bottom of the screen are replicated at the top of the screen in anaglyph mode - Many HIP and HD stars do not appear in the search menu
Real bugs:
- Inaccurate tidal heating calculations, makes some moons too hot (e.g. asteroid Dactyl) - Crash when entering the Display menu for users with single-monitor setups - Does not work in Windows XP - Menu button sound doesn't work - Lens flare color in Normal or Super diffraction spike mode is inaccurate when close to a star - 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) - Flashing landscape LOD on a planet when Wiki for it is displayed - 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 - 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 - "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 - Visual atmosphere heights are inconsistently and unrealistically generated - Physical atmosphere properties are inconsistently and unrealistically generated, and are not tied to the visual models - Cyclones are not generated in the southern hemispheres of gas giants - Shimmering bloom splotch when very close to the surface of a planet [example] - Lighting errors in system browser when viewing from outside the system - "Opacity spot" in the subsolar region of atmospheres - Strange behavior of fish eye and cube map views when near planets (only when a planetary object is in the neg_z face) - Only one planetary nebula model is used per galaxy - Camera will be set to 90° FOV when returning from fisheye or cubemap view sometimes - If spacecraft .sss Length is very different from its .cfg length, there may be rendering glitches - Eclipse shadows on atmosphere not occluded by planet [example]
I can't hide the Windows 7 Taskbar with a "full screen = 2" SPACE ENGINE 0.972. But other games are normal in full screen.
And the stereoscopic 3D doesn't work at all. My 3D component is NVIDIA 3D Vision and when I start the game ,the sensor indicator didn't light . It's also normal in the other games.
Added (08.01.2015, 12:35) --------------------------------------------- sry i put a wrong URL of img and now have fixed it
Having another problem, I can't fly into Irr galaxies. Each time I try it crashes saying my gpu timed out. I know its set to time out after 2 seconds and can be changed in the registry. Will that help? Or is there another way to handle this? I have a 3.6ghz quad core AMD processor, 12gb ram, and the vid card isa Nvidia GeForce GT 610. It says in the dxdiag approx. memory is at 4043mb, but i know the card is only 1024mb. I'm guessing its calculating the extra RAM or VRAM available from the 12gb of memory i have.
Whenever i try to open the program, an error message pops up saying "(Null) (2.1) (Null)". If i close the error message, the program continues to load for a short while, the completely crashes with no trace. Can anyone help me with this?
Found what appears to be a glitch in atmospheric pressure on a randomly generated planet (star RS-0-9-103060820-15-4-4-1631-110). Planet's atmospheric pressure displays as 728.05 atmospheres but data on the planet's wiki page appears to contradict that. For example, the atmosphere's height is only 37 km and it's mass is only 0.00049418 earth masses.
Was looking at the new version of Space Engine, and saw that when estramos the atmosphere of the planet, the Star Flare practically disappears, leaving only a white giant point ... was wondering if this is a bug or a setting? This was not the case in the previous version. (Sorry my bad English).
I have noticed a (Wiki?) error with an atmosphere on one of my custom catalog planets:
The atmosphere height as specified in the .sc file under >catalogs>planets, set as "Height 77.643438" is unchanged from when I had it in 0.971.
Is it likely a part of the atmosphere bugs specified in this thread's OP?
LATE EDIT: I realized it was an error on my own part, when looking through the catalog files for the Solar System. Apparently, I didn't notice that the format for "Molar Mass" had changed from kg/mol, to g/mol, and so my original value of 0.0028... was throwing off the calculations. I fixed it and the calculations now appear correct.
Specs: Dell Inspiron 5547 (Laptop); 8 gigabytes of RAM; Processor: Intel® Core™ i5-4210U CPU @ 1.70GHz (4 CPUs), ~2.4GHz; Operating System: Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit; Graphics: Intel® HD Graphics 4400 (That's all there is :( )
Edited by PlutonianEmpire - Sunday, 11.01.2015, 05:49
Whenever i try to open the program, an error message pops up saying "(Null) (2.1) (Null)". If i close the error message, the program continues to load for a short while, the completely crashes with no trace. Can anyone help me with this?
I had that problem too. I solved it through uninstalling the driver of my graphics card although SE didnt work anymore after that. So the Problem is (obviously) your (old) graphics card driver, which seems to be not the latest availiable. It now works for me after installing the latest driver.
Look at those happy sunflowers . . . Now you should be happier than before!
1. If you fly near the center of an galaxy between 0.06 ly/s and 0.16 ly/s you see the background always flicker. It seems the engine creates a skybox but does not realize that you are keep moving so it creates again and again a new one.
2. If you change the scale of "Point sources" they get always bigger even if you choose a smaller size and if you set the value back to the original (1.000) they will stay bigger.
You have to restart Space Engine to get the normal size.
3. Well, not really a problem but the Starcluster just pop in and out after a certain range, in 0.9.7.1 they faded smoothly in and out.
Open config/main.cfg and change this parameter to 13:
PlanetHeightmapFormat 13 // format of the terrain heightmap textures: 13 - R32F, 16 - RGBA32F
I cannot find any such parameter i have the Intel HD: Glitchy landscape and textures on planets problem i just downloaded it and this glitch is a real bummer...
Hi, I can't get Space Engine to run. I'm not on a high end system BUT I think my laptop is still meeting the requirements (Intel Core i5, GeForce GT 520M). Video drivers are also updated to the latest.
Please find the log file attached.
Thankful for any help, I'm a science teacher and would love to use this software as a part of my work.
I had that problem too. I solved it through uninstalling the driver of my graphics card although SE didnt work anymore after that. So the Problem is (obviously) your (old) graphics card driver, which seems to be not the latest availiable. It now works for me after installing the latest driver.
Thanks man, but i couldn't find a new graphics card update. I tried installing 0.9.7.1 and i opened it, and it said I need a better version of openGL, specifically better than OpenGL 2.1. I got Intel Driver Updater and tried using the auto installer but it says I have nothing to install. Not sure what to do. Any ideas?
EDIT: I uninstalled my graphics driver then reinstalled them using Intel Driver Updater and a different error message popped up and said my OpenGL version is 2.1 and is not new enough to be compatible with Space Engine and im not sure how to install a new OpenGL version. I would love to use this simulator and extremely excited for it to work.
I wanted to ask in space engine 9.7.0.2 corona of stars is not animated, is a problem of some settings? Thank you for your e attention.
Added (09.01.2015, 23:10) --------------------------------------------- In space engine 0.9.7.2 sometimes the background universe seems inside a cube .. is a bug?
Mainboard ASUS ... Processor Intel i7 3Ghz ... RAM 16GB DDR3 Corsair Dominator ... Graphics Card Asus GeForce 780GTX Direct CU II .....
Well, Id like to start out, that this is an amazing job done by you guys. But there have been a few bugs. When loading sprites, they glitch out, badly.(NOTE:The following is only for spiral galaxys) The skybox for the galaxy appears with the sprite for looking at the galaxy from a distance. These both appear in 2d, the galaxy model stays in a position, in 2d. And the skybox for the galaxy remains staring at you forever, at whatever angle you look at it. When you zoom into the stars, (with elliptical galaxy too) they render in these, cubes. It kinda looks like the edge of the procedural generation of the universe. Right now, im trying to re-install it and mess around with different options, so if anything comes up, ill just post it on here for info. I use Intel HD graphics 4000, and i have 8 gigs of ram, Intel i5-3210M cpu 2.5Ghz. I know there have been bugs with intel (thanks intel) but, if anything ahs been figured out, please tell me. Id also like to note, at first i had no issues with this game.
And i hope it wasnt answered somewhere earlier in the forum, I am just too lazy to read all of that.
EDIT:When moving, the skybox stays in one place like a picture overlapping the engine. When stopped, it does that weird fractal thing. this all happens inside the galaxy. And I zoomed out to where i could see the entire galaxy, it did what i first described in this comment. Accept, the engine began loading another image, that was an image from a veiwpoint alot closer to the galaxy, almost inside the galactic plane. This took up a lot of processing power, it took atleast 10 seconds for space engine to close after I alt-tabbed out (which took longer) and clicked "close program"
EDIT:I was playing around with space engine, and i noticed that when you load up the galaxy when you click planetarium, the problem goes away. So now we know this is a fixable bug. Anyway, this skybox problem occurs when i go to a planet and the terrain starts to generate, its like the skybox is locked in place on the screen. Mayby the mipmaps does something to the skybox so it can load the planet.
ENG
New site
United States 
It looks like (null) 2.1 (null).
China 
Pirate 
Sweden 
Germany 
Italy 