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.
I found this bug by revisiting my custom system Le Monde Merveilleux where he was an eclipse happens when the mini-sun is between the planet and moon, as if the mini-sun is behind this moon (note : the moon is so close to the planet and when it is lit, it can shine a little the surface of the planet, which is why the area is not eclipsed in total darkness) :
I attached my se.log but not sure you can find information on this strange bug.
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.
Had a closer look and it seems the fault is as much with some of the programs I was using. Updated what I could and settled for sufficient functionality where I couldn't. After some more wrangling which included fresh re-installs, I opted to update to the most recent NVIDIA driver (373.06). Space Engine does run fairly smoother and takes longer between crashes (or threatening to do so). I haven't timed it but my impression is that I can get an hour or so of exploration out of it now. Haven't yet tested the other software that may have me backtrack on this decision.
QuoteDracontes ()
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.
Tried to reproduce this error again on both drivers 347.09 and 373.06 on their default settings. No such (bad) luck it seems. Can only assume there was some instability caused by the OpenCL software for which I had to settle regarding functionality.
QuoteDracontes ()
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).
On driver 373.06 I've found that in general, not doing this doesn't affect crash frequency one way or another. Sooner compounding actions like exploring for long enough, using the star browser with a search radius of 1'000 light-years and above*, or changing scale from intragalactic to intergalactic swiftly enough tends to affect that frequency far more reliably (with default settings on everything pertinent).
I have logs for two such crashes in which, at the end of a long exploratory bout with intensive star browser use (though with reasonable search radii for the most part), I scrolled all the way out of the galaxy I was in to (presumably) outside the SE universe for the first one and in the local galactic group for the second one. Shortly after there was an unannounced "Runtime Error" (one for se201610141603rfvs.log and two in quick succession for se201610142200rfvs.log).
* As a habit I've shifted that value in multiples of ten. It's been my experience that a 100 light-year search radius often reaches the 10'000 star cut-off in most regions of a spiral galaxy, except the outer rim. I've also found that, once you've explored enough, shifting the value in quick succession (searching, not finding anything, shifting value, searching again) tends to make what I presume to be the whitespace used to format the text columns presenting a selected object's characteristics to collapse and expand in a blinking fashion.
Otherwise. I've had a few episodes of blinking objects on the planetary system browser but I've reacted accordingly exiting the program, as (as expected) waiting too long on the 347.09 driver resulted in an program crash and I don't presume that behavior to have changed.
I do note that while opening Space Engine again after program crashes tends to return you to where you were just before the mishap, when opening SE after runtime errors you're returned to where you were at the end of the last successful (enough) exit. Looking at /config after a runtime error crash shows journal.cfg to have a change date close enough to the time of the error and save-user.cfg has a change date removed enough from that to correspond to the end of the penultimate exploratory bout.
One thing I noticed on my first experimenting on Space Engine and which so far doesn't seem to have been addressed is this "stirring effect" on diffuse nebulae when rotating around them in some directions. The objects forming the nebula rotate as if there was something going through their midst.
Dracontes, the one thing I've noticed in your logs is that the loader says your system has 2GB RAM total, not 4. This could possibly lead to RAM addressing or accessing issues between software and operating system.
"Time is illusion. Lunchtime doubly so." Douglas N. Adams My mods Asus x555ub: cpu i5-6200u - ram 4gb - gpu nvidia geforce 940m 2gb vram
For some reason, my game completely blacked out when I tilted the camera the wrong way. It seemed to happen more often around hotter stars, and I just figured out that it has something to do with comet tails. Is anyone else having this problem?
That is odd, Mosfet. Had a look inside the computer: one of the RAM cards wasn't quite well seated. Cleaned it and put it back, properly this time. But that wasn't it.
Here's the situation as detailed on both Speccy and Task Manager when only those two programs are (ostensibly) running soon enough after turning on the computer.
Looked around elsewhere online and apparently programs only having individually 2GB available to them is a default limitation of my Windows installation. Not particularly looking forward to going through further suggested tweaks considering what I've done so far (I've addressed PAE as best I could years ago).
Hello, I am having trouble downloading the torrent files for the solar system HD pack. I am getting a 'timeout error' when trying to access it. IS there a way around this other than downloading the texture files individually? thanks for any help. love space engine so far, cant wait to get the HD packs installed! a
UncleFester, SE doesn't necessarily needs HD textures to run. Your se.log, located in your SE system/ directory, could contain some clues about your issue, but I think that Intel HD 2000 doesn't meet OpenGL 3.3 specifications, you could try by updating your graphics drivers but it's a long shot. Unless you have a laptop with hybrid Intel/AMD or Intel/Nvidia cards, in that case you'll have to be sure that AMD or Nvidia chipset are used by SpaceEngine instead of Intel.
"Time is illusion. Lunchtime doubly so." Douglas N. Adams My mods Asus x555ub: cpu i5-6200u - ram 4gb - gpu nvidia geforce 940m 2gb vram
I'm having an issue where (small?) objects are not loading unless they are nearby or selected.
You can see there is a bright comet that disappears when I select a different object. It becomes visible again when highlighted through a marker or orbit line.
Same sort of situation happens with this planet and its moons. Thye become visible again at distance when selected or highlighted by a marker or orbit line.
I visited the system with the comet and it's the same for me. I'm not entirely sure but I think something similar was mentioned before, maybe I'm wrong but it could have been fixed already for the next update.
"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 is an issue with drawing priorities when viewing objects from certain angles:
In older SE versions this used to occur with spaceships in the foreground and planetary rings in the background. Now it has reappeared in this scenario where a star is in front of the black hole's accretion disk but the accretion disk is rendered 1st instead.
Hi, I'm here for my first post, so a quick thanks for the development here. This is a wicked cool program and I love travelling around and looking at all the different types of stars and galaxies.
Spaceships are in beta, I realize this. So, here's some feedback regarding an issue I'm having with them. I want to make multiple spaceships which orbit planets in a given system, go to another system, do the same. So far, no trouble. But after a few closes/re-opens of the program, suddenly, and inexplicably, a spaceship i had orbiting, say, the 4th planet in a system, is now on the surface of its parent star. Good luck getting out of there on some low-grade engines, right?
I've attached an image (though the description basically covers the issue) and my log file.
I did some searching, but could not find this in any known issues or otherwise mentioned, apologies if this is a repeat post.
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