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 updated your video card drivers. This may solve 99% of all issues.
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 graphics card-specific issues
If you do not know which graphics card (chip) 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.
Intel HD: Glitchy landscape and textures on planets
Open config/main-user.cfg and change this parameter to true:
Note that this is an experimental feuture and may cause glitches; collision detection also works incorrectly in this mode. Also, read Fixing common issues #3.
Intel HD: Red clouds on Earth
Install the latest driver for Intel HD.
Intel HD: Black screen
Disable comet tails. Go to the main menu, then Settings -> View, and uncheck "comet tails". If you even don't see the main menu, close SE, delete the file config/main-user.cfg, and try again.
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"
To fix that, 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-user.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
SpaceEngine needs a modern "gaming" graphics card to run. Weak cards like Intel Graphics (many laptops have it) or 10 year old devices like GeForce 5700 will not run SpaceEngine. There is no way but to update your hardware. 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 or Radeon with at least 1 GB of dedicated video memory
I stress the special role played by graphics card's onboard memory (VRAM), and 1 GB is the absolute minimum. The engine uses a large amount of data that must be in video memory (textures, meshes etc). The good performance will be only with a dedicated video card with 1024+ MB of onboard memory. Almost all modern $100+ devices can run SE smoothly. CPU power is not so important for SE, but having many cores could improve performance on fast interstellar and intergalactic flights. CPU does not significantly affect the landscape generation speed because it is done completely on the graphics chip.
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 the 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 chip. If you can't find a 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 it is a full version, not a patch!). If you install a new version overwriting the old one, you may get many bugs and glitches.
c) Just restart SE. It helps in 99% of cases.
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.). The video memory is the most important resource for SpaceEngine. It may help to disable the Windows Aero theme too, as it consumes a lot of video memory. - Reduce "Landscape LOD" to -2 in Graphics settings (Ctrl+F4) - Set up the amount of video memory in the config/main-user.cfg file:
VideoMemorySize 2048 // graphics 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) Blurry textures on Solar system planets
This is not a bug. Our Solar system planets and its satellites have no procedural textures, they use real ones with limited level-of-detail. You can download addons with high resolution textures to increase the level of detail of real planets. But don't expect 1 cm level of detail; these addons also have limited size, and thus limited resolution (up to 150 meters per pixel for some bodies).
7) 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:
a) Open Windows Control Panel, navigate to Display, and set the DPI scaling to "Smaller - 100% (default)" - it should look like this.
b) 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" look the same. This is right! This switch changes the rendering technology, not the visual appearance - 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 - Galaxy/nebula sprites will rotate when seen from certain angles - Lens flares are distorted by gravitational lensing (black holes and ship warp drive effect) - Solar system moons don't have extremely accurate orbits (requires implementation of custom orbit models, e.g. VSOP-87) - Solar eclipses on Earth, Moon, Jupiter and other real planets are inaccurate (the same as above) - 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) - Many HIP and HD stars do not appear in the search menu, as well as procedural objects (RS xxxx) - Camera sometimes falling through the surface - Collisions detection between ships is not implemented yet; and between ship and planet is inaccurate
Real bugs:
- Lines or junctures are visible on planetary surface of real planets - GUI response issues with some users (interface items glitchy or not respond easily) - 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 - Level horizon command (End key) doesn't work properly on oblate objects - Weird behavior of movement keys in tracking mode (T) and after releasing it - 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 - Problems when releasing Left + Right click - Music player will unpause when SE window is minimized and restored, or when entering and exiting the main menu - Switching to fullscreen doesn't work sometimes - 3D water fog sometimes starts above or below the water surface - Visual atmosphere heights are inconsistently and unrealistically generated - Physical atmosphere properties are inconsistently and unrealistically generated, and are not tied to the visual models - Shimmering bloom splotch when very close to the surface of a planet [example] - Lighting errors in system browser when viewing from outside the system - "Sky lighting shadow" in the subsolar region of atmospheres - Problems with the skybox export interface, and with the planetarium after using it, for some users - 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 - VSync doesn't work after usage of Oculus Rift in the Direct mode, sometimes it doesn't work at startup when Oculus Rift is connected.
Object Finder in SE 0.980 has "HD 131399 A b" planet listed. But when I clicked on it, the message came up that says "Object not found."
Indeed the object is there, if you reach the star HD 131399 A the planet is listed and visitable into the planetary system navigator. Even if selected, though, the object finder says the same. Some sneaky syntax error in the catalog, perhaps? Or a bug...
"Time is illusion. Lunchtime doubly so." Douglas N. Adams My mods Asus x555ub: cpu i5-6200u - ram 4gb - gpu nvidia geforce 940m 2gb vram
There are many planets near A or B components of the binary stars, which have the same issue with find by a name. It is a bug in the code, I have fixed it.
So I have a problem where the planets, stars, etc as well as the orbits will not show up, even though the screen says that I have clicked on earth for example and it will show all the information on the left side of the screen. Does it with every single thing and all I did was open up one of the default space ships on some random planet to fly around, and after that, they all did this.
Edited by bigredstar91 - Tuesday, 20.09.2016, 19:27
vladimir, i know you dont own 1440p monitor to check bugs. but wanted to show some bug i have with 1440p monitor: maybe someone know what is the cause. thanks this is near a black hole
"we began as wanderers, and we are wanderers still" -carl sagan
bigredstar91, the image you attached it's a bit small so I'm not entirely sure, but did you disable perhaps the planets feature on the visual options menu? that's the one to the right.
I see also a syntax error regarding CatalogSW.pak,
Code
[MT] "data/catalogs/CatalogsSW.pak/planets/Malastare.sc" line 388: ERROR: Closing bracket '}' expected in the tag 'Planet'
which could lead to subsequent errors in english translation database:
Code
[MT] "data/locale/eng-db.cfg" line 15: ERROR: Syntax error ''t' [MT] "data/locale/eng-db.cfg" line 15: ERROR: Syntax error '.' [MT] "data/locale/eng-db.cfg" line 15: ERROR: Syntax error '.'
Edit:
It seems that the last version I could check of the Star Wars addon has some issues with last version of SE, see if by removing the addon it solves your other problems.
"Time is illusion. Lunchtime doubly so." Douglas N. Adams My mods Asus x555ub: cpu i5-6200u - ram 4gb - gpu nvidia geforce 940m 2gb vram
Mosfet, I went ahead and got rid of the star wars planets and then noticed that I did turn off the planets so than you for that. Not sure what that was but anyway, thank you for all your help
Operating System: Windows 7 Home Premium 32-bit SP1 CPU: Intel Core i7 2600K @ 3.40GHz RAM: 8.00GB Dual-Channel DDR3 @ 665MHz (9-9-9-24) (apparently only 4 GB are usable) Motherboard: Gigabyte Technology Co. Ltd. P61-DS3-B3 (Socket 1155) Monitor: SAMTRON (1280x1024@75Hz) Graphics Card: 1023MB NVIDIA GeForce GTX 550 Ti
I hope that's all that's needed.
The graphics card driver version is the ~2-year-old 347.09 because, beyond being disinclined to mess with my computer's overall stability, the most recent WHQL version is tripped up by my use of OpenCL-capable programs. I'm told the driver has failed and then successfully recovered after such a program is closed, involving a few seconds of black screen prior to being alerted to that. I've found through Windows' Event Viewer that Space Engine causes the same error with the older driver when on default settings (with no black screen; see SEnvlddmlkm.evtx file ) . After I adjusted the image settings on the NVIDIA control panel to "use the advanced 3D image settings" and, on the off-chance it mattered, the PhysX processor to the GPU, those errors as triggered by Space Engine seem to have disappeared. I still had the flickering of the objects displayed on the planetary system browser occur as a warning of sorts for an impending crash as detailed here. In any case, whenever the program crashes or threatens to do so I've deleted the cache folder on a matter of principle (except one time). At some point I approached a galaxy and was attempting to enter it, when I had one of those Microsoft Visual C++ runtime crashes I encountered in earlier experimentation with Space Engine which tended to happen after some time exploring, like the above mentioned flickering (see SEapperror.evtx file; I have the crash reports if you care for them). Starting the program again, after setting LoaderMode to 1 on main-user.cfg in the interim as recommended elsewhere on the forum, I was at more or less the same spot and managed to get in. After some exploring within that galaxy, I was at the planet...
Hmm, now I can't export Wiki data (not that I've tried before). You can find it on a pair of screenshots below.
So when I was searching for stars in the star browser at that location and stuff started lagging and blinking, if a bit more sedately than usual, I took that as my cue for a program restart, even with the search running. A few crashes afterwards, all stemming from similar circumstances (present on SEapperror.evtx as well), I realized that now the star search doesn't find anything when it should, even with default settings. Is there anything I should do before going for a clean (re)install? Also, I'd really like to not go through the tedious process of finding a more recent driver that works properly (slow Internet connection, apparently now I need to boot into Safe Mode so the driver installer can work properly) but if even so it's strongly recommended...
Let's see if I can reproduce it again... See se-RFVS-20160922.log and screenshots below:
Managed to reproduce it 4 times, cache folder deleted previously or not, web browser opened or not, when searching within a 10'000 light year radius would before have things hang for a bit and then develop as expected. Searching within an 100 light year radius has the numbers at the top run through their paces but no results are returned. Looking at the pertinent bit of the universe map you can see there are abundant items to be listed.
Not sure what is going on this time really (and I did check to make sure all my buttons were on this time haha) but for some reason, whenever I attempt to ad a mod (specifically any space ships like the ISS , Hubble Telescope, or really any ships period) I end up getting this (refer to inserted picture) and that tiny purple dot is where the International Space Station is supposed to be, but it's just not showing up. Now it does allow me to create it as in I can pilot it and fly it around like the default Space Engine ships, just no textures are showing up. And yes I am putting the files in the correct folders by going through data<models<textures and then putting the folder named ISS into it. So not really sure what I am doing incorrectly if anything.
Odd thing is though, is whenever I download anything else like a planet, galaxy, nebula, etc from one of the various mods, all I have to do is just put them in the addons folder and poof, they are there when I click the search for button.
That's because probably the addons you are trying to use are not yet updated for SE 0980, it's not uncommon since SE 0972+ many changes were done in order to simplify the addon use I know that some modders are waiting a new major version to update those ships, 'cause usually they were very prolific, I guess there's much work to do and no time for it.
If you want to know if that's the case, you can see if there are errors in console (the tilde key) or check also your se.log for errors. If you find anything, usually it means that something is changed from a previous version.
"Time is illusion. Lunchtime doubly so." Douglas N. Adams My mods Asus x555ub: cpu i5-6200u - ram 4gb - gpu nvidia geforce 940m 2gb vram
That's because probably the addons you are trying to use are not yet updated for SE 0980, it's not uncommon since SE 0972+ many changes were done in order to simplify the addon use I know that some modders are waiting a new major version to update those ships, 'cause usually they were very prolific, I guess there's much work to do and no time for it.
Well then we all need to get together and hurry up with version 0.9.8.1 And get these mods to work in a more simpler fashion haha :P
So, suddenly every water surface don't had anymore the "wave" effect, and when I go underwate there isn't also the "fog" effect. Furthermore, I noticed that in my graphic settings tab there isn't the "3d water" checkbox.
ENG
New site
Russian Federation 
Italy 
Pirate 
Israel 
Portugal 
And get these mods to work in a more simpler fashion haha :P
Germany 