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]
If the HDD usage is still high even when you're sitting still and doing nothing in SE, then I suggest going into the shader cache folder and checking the times that files are modified. If you sit still, don't move the camera, have time paused, etc., then check the shader cache after 5 minutes, probably the last file modification would be at least 5 minutes prior. You should also enable timestamps in the log (in main.cfg, at the bottom). Most likely the last entry in the log would be stamped 5+ minutes prior as well. If both of those things are true, and if you check the entire SE install, and it didn't write to anything, then that would almost conclusively rule out SE doing things internally with the HDD as the cause of your observations. In that case, you'd probably be looking at some weird issue with Windows, some weird interaction with SE perhaps (though I can't think of anything that would do that), rather than something SpaceEngine does on its own as a consequence of its design.
What is different with .96 to .97? Can Space Engineer say
I used .96 and it patches up to 0.9.6.2, runs great. After that .97.0 came and I reported at the time it runs poorly, same with .97.1.
How can I close .97 then run .96 immediately after and have no problem. There must be something within the code of .97 onwards as .96 doesn't show any of these problems.
Anyway I'll try to look at that. I will be going SSD one day soon and maybe install windows or move to Windows 10. This might get fixed over the course of time but it doesn't explain how one version runs no problem and the other is struggling.
chromatic9, if you want to help try to find the cause of this, you should perform the experiment that I proposed. Otherwise the only way anything will get done is if SpaceEngineer can find the problem and solution on his own, and I don't know when or if that will happen. Trying to figure out the cause of an obscure problem being experienced by a single user is pretty far down on his priority list, I would guess.
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
Looking around the ship, all the textures and mesh parts correctly load (as long as I look at it in a specific angle) and I even managed to get it all loaded at a very specific angle, but the whole thing just wont load naturally.
I am in a star system and so not interstellar, I have reloaded the mesh a few times, same result. I have imported another model and that seems to work, and this exact model worked fine in 0.9.7. I also have a GTX 770 with latest drivers, the problem persisted on my old drivers and the new ones. I have no clue what the issue is.
Any help will be much appreciated and if I can get this to work I will gladly upload it for everyone to use
Looking around the ship, all the textures and mesh parts correctly load (as long as I look at it in a specific angle) and I even managed to get it all loaded at a very specific angle, but the whole thing just wont load naturally.
Looks like
QuoteHarbingerDawn ()
- If spacecraft .sss Length is very different from its .cfg length, there may be rendering glitches
You may also want to set the unit to 0 when generating the model and let the engine determine the unit.
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
Lucas, if you're going to upload long strings of code like that, please put it in a spoiler or in a code tag.
As for your log, it says you're using OpenGL 3.2. Your graphics card should support 3.3 (which is required by 0.972), so you need to update your graphics drivers. Get them from geforce.com
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
Going to try and increase some of the specular values to make it a bit more shiny, looks a tad matte at the moment. Any where I can upload this when I am done for the rest of you guys to use?
Just a word to say that your fix (#7 in the OP, installing the DLL in the SE/system directory) fixed my transparent planets problem Thank you so much!!
Edit : ...still have some problems with some suns, but that's much better...
I have following issues with latest version of SE:
1. Diffraction spikes do dissapear on some (blue) star types at certain distances (circa 30-6AU). Those star types are O, B (to a minor degree, it's mostly ok, but sometimes slightly flashing at given distances when I move camera around), and following white dwarf types at a distance between 2 and 9,5 mil km: DA, DB (same minor issues as with B star types).
2. When i move camera away from most stars (especially F-K types), diffraction spikes can quite rapidy change their color from warm yellow/orange, to pale yellow/almost white. Is this a bug or it's intentional effect? If it is, this effect should be more smooth. I think.
3. T type brown dwarves are pitch black. This is odd, and i think it's a bug, since planets around them are illuminated with dim red light.
4. I have problem with star surfaces LOD. I can clearly see that engine is loading more or less detailed squares of textures, as i move my camera around. It looks ugly and it's not smooth at all, as it was in previous version (honestly, I also do not like new version of star surfaces and dark spots - they're more buggy, and more often are generated on top of each other).
I use Astroniki2 Diff. spikes with Eden flares. My graphics card is GTX 470, and I use latest drivers now (update didn't solved my problems).
I have problem with star surfaces LOD. I can clearly see that engine is loading more or less detailed squares of textures, as i move my camera around.
This is a known issue, I think it's a problem with mipmap generation.
QuoteStorm87 ()
T type brown dwarves are pitch black
Try adjusting "night side lights" value or toggling atmospheres. They do have some light, but it is absorbed by their atmosphere. And as you pointed out, star surface brightness and planet illumination are poorly related.
QuoteStorm87 ()
When i move camera away from most stars (especially F-K types), diffraction spikes can quite rapidy change their color from warm yellow/orange, to pale yellow/almost white
This is an issue with how the lens flare code works in this version, and affects normal and super spikes (simple spikes look correct).
QuoteStorm87 ()
Diffraction spikes do dissapear on some (blue) star types at certain distances (circa 30-6AU). Those star types are O, B (to a minor degree, it's mostly ok, but sometimes slightly flashing at given distances when I move camera around), and following white dwarf types at a distance between 2 and 9,5 mil km: DA, DB (same minor issues as with B star types).
I cannot confirm this, they work perfectly for me.
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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