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]
-Albedo variation sometimes causes horrendous pitch-black spots on bodies. Not realistic or good looking at all. (I personally think the albedo variation should be made optional, as I think it looks hideous in general. I think it is very poorly implemented.)
-Not sure if its a bug or not, but planet and moon colours all seem very desaturated now. I think this might be due to the albedo variation (yet another strike against it.)
-Many body parameters seem to have no relevance to the game. For instance, there is no telling whether increasing the frequency value of volcanoes on a body will make thousands upon thousands, or remove any volcanoes that were already there.
On top of this, statements like "NoOcean true" seem to be ignored sometimes now. I created a moon, with the statement NoOcean true, and in game it had a planet-wide ocean.
-Often on startup, all catalog galaxies, stars and planets will be disabled.
There seems to be a tremendous number of bugs with this patch. Not entirely sure why it was released, there was really no need to rush. I think it would have been better to withhold it.
The bizarre behavior of 0.97 in general is still there that I've talked about before. 0.96 is so much better at rendering and loading. 0.97 is very busy loading stuff, even though its suppose to be GPU procedural based.
For example a simple procedural planet in front of you can take much longer to render than 0.96, frame rate drops down 15-25-35fps, hard drive is very busy, chugging and stuttering frame rate on a simple task. Once its done I have like 300fps, if you move around the planet a little not even fast then its like the program tries to reload/re-render the whole lot and sends the frame rate crashing down, skipping and chugging.
In 0.96 while rendering even a more detailed planet in front of you, it does this very easily, very quickly, frame rate is very high and more importantly its consistent, no hard drive chugging for ages. You can zip around the planet while its rendering without large drops in frames. Once its done rendering in 0.96 you're free to move around very fast, there's no reloading or crazy hard drive activity because you decided to move to the right a bit. In 0.97 I can be running 80fps then a slight move can cause a large skip down to single digit frames then the next moment its up in the 40-50s seemingly reloading/re-rendering.
Next example is say you're on the surface, stationary looking at the mountain range in 0.97. You can leave it for any amount of time, you think its done but it can go from staying at 50fps down to 30fps while stuff seems to be reloading, hard drive can be heard not major activity though. Then it can go back to 50, then drop again down 30 while it starts doing whatever in the background. In 0.96 in the same situation once its done its done, no more endlessly doing little bits of loading, frame rate is fixed. It won't do anything much until you move quite far but even then its more than up to the task of loading on the fly. In my old videos I'm able to circle around a insanely detailed mountain while its rendering on the fly. This is not worth trying in 0.97, not a chance of keeping up.
0.97 is like some constant micromanaging, never happy, unnecessarily loading and rendering. I find it annoying and cumbersome to use how it just craps a brick when you decide to move.
kaleidonkep99, try running as administrator, some other Win 8 users have said they had to do that. If you still have problems, read the OP for AMD card issues.
chromatic9, there is no "0.97" family of releases. 0.9.7.1 was just as different from 0.9.7.0 as 0.9.7.0 was from 0.9.6.2. The version numbering system just changed, that's all. I don't have time at the moment, but I'll look into the things you reported later.
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
When I tried to install the game, the default install location was a "games" folder which I do not have, so I chose to install it in my Program Files (x86) folder. Upon instillation, the game will not launch. I have a fairly new PC that I built under a year ago, so I'm fairly certain I meet the specs.
I managed to download all of the sol system'shigh res texture packs from the add-ons page of the site but the 64k Mars elevation map pak files keep Not Found The requested URL /addons/Mars/Bump-PBC-16k.pak was not found on this server. The requested URL /addons/Mars/Bump-PBC-32k.pak was not found on this server. The requested URL /addons/Mars/Bump-PBC-64k.pak was not found on this server.
All of them (3)
So I guess it is not a matter of server beeing busy but maybe the links are broken maby?
Do I just need to change the installation location or is it another problem?
Sometimes people report weird things happening when you put some programs in Program Files. Move the SE folder to some other place and see if it works then.
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
chromatic9, there is no "0.97" family of releases. 0.9.7.1 was just as different from 0.9.7.0 as 0.9.7.0 was from 0.9.6.2. The version numbering system just changed, that's all. I don't have time at the moment, but I'll look into the things you reported later.
Yes I understand. I get the same performance issue since 0.97.0. If you remember we had comets, aurora's and maybe some other fundamental changes introduced. I could try to dig up Space Engineers posts, I'm sure he said some important things changed for .97 and these have stayed with the subsequent releases.
All my galaxies and some stars have this weird "boxed" appearance when viewed from very far (Galaxies) or very close (stars), as if the sprite is not loading properly; the artifact tends to slightly change appearance and shade as the camera moves around. It also happens with things like nebulas and some lens flare types.
Running nVidia 347 drivers (latest), GTX 770, i5-4570 and Windows 7 x64.
MdR, please read the opening post, you need to attach your log.
chromatic9, yes, I see what you mean about 0.96 being smooth. Though I can't say I observe the magnitude of difference that you describe. And after doing some testing in 0.962, 0.970, and 0.972, I can say that, for me, 0.972 actually has the best performance of the three (30-40 fps when generating a terra), followed by 0.962 (30-35 fps), and then 0.970 (~25 fps), though performance decreases after a while. 0.972 performs especially well considering that the average amount of generation required per planet has increased by approximately a factor of two since 0.96.
I also don't observe the phenomenon you report about crazy hard drive activity. I didn't use any diagnostic tools to measure this, but my HDD light on my case behaved no differently when generating a planet than it is right now while I type this. And the only thing SE regularly writes to disk are the log file and cached shaders, so there shouldn't be much to write in the first place.
With your system specs, you really should be seeing better results than you are. Doc has a GTX 760, and he has told me that everything is fast and smooth even while generating terrain (usually 50+ fps). So this seems to be something that is specific to you, rather than being an issue with the program that affects all users.
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
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