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 have a little problem. Whenever I enter an atmosphere the diffraction spikes of the parent star completely disappear. Any ideas on how to fix this?
Why fear our insignificance in the Universe? Because of it we have infinite wonders to explore, and it gives us the freedom to make what we want of our lives.
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!
"Time is illusion. Lunchtime doubly so." Douglas N. Adams My mods Asus x555ub: cpu i5-6200u - ram 4gb - gpu nvidia geforce 940m 2gb vram
Why fear our insignificance in the Universe? Because of it we have infinite wonders to explore, and it gives us the freedom to make what we want of our lives.
yes, thanks. It's RS 8474-1798-7-532679-653? The fourth planet, I guess? Edit: mmm no. Anyway diffraction spikes can be influenced by the atmosphere thickness, like, for real. Make sure you're using the last driver update for your graphic card.
"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 was checking the Pistol Star incorrect data, when I realized that the coordinates reported in Info window are wrong, but RA and Dec assigned in Stars.sc are correct. The same star has correct coordinates reported in Info window in SE 0974 RC3.
SE 0974 RC3:
SE 0980:
Edit:
Try this:
Go to the Sun; Search and select Pistol Star; Press I: RA/Dec are correct.
Pick a random star, Go there; Search and select Pistol Star; Press I: RA/Dec are different.
Am I missing something? Is the frame of reference changing with camera position? It's like this by design and I missed such a big thing?
Is the frame of reference changing with camera position? It's like this by design and I missed such a big thing?
Yes. The the 'Right ascension' and 'Declination' displayed in the info window have nothing to do with the position of the star viewed from the earth. They refer to the camera position from which the star is viewed.
Anyway diffraction spikes can be influenced by the atmosphere thickness, like, for real. Make sure you're using the last driver update for your graphic card.
It's not just TheAstrobiologist, I get that too; diffraction spikes completely disappear when at "sea level" of an atmosphere. This happens with all atmosphere models.
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 :( )
Hey Guys First of all i got to say that this Engine finally made one of my Dreams come true, so i wanted to Thank you for this amazing Experience with this Engine. The Engine works pretty fluent and looks Pretty but i got a big Problem with the Star Coronas. In the Net i saw plenty of Videos and Screens where Stars got a nice animated Corona. Sadly this isnt working in my Version. All i get is:
Of course i searched in this Forum and found old Posts about incompatible Drivers from Nvidia, so i updated my Driver from 372.70 to 375.70. Still the same Problem so i checked if the "Working Driver" from Forum is still available for Download but then i saw that it is only compatible till Win 8.1
I also Reserved more VRam for the Engine in its Config and setted Stuff like LOD to 2 (i know it shouldnt affect the Corona but still worth a try)
I uploaded my SE.log File so you might be able to check out what Problem i got.
My Hardware Spec AMD FX-4100 @ 4x 4.2GHZ Gigabyte GA 970A-UD3 2x4GB Corsair Vengence RAM with 1600 Palit Geforce GTX 750TI Storm X Dual with 2GB VRAM Windows 10 64Bit Pro
FSchollbrock, the reason may be this message in the log file:
Code
[MT] Loading shader "data/shaders/Shaders0980.pak/sun_flare_ghost.glsl" (defines: MODULATE) [MT] WARNING: seextureGenerator::Init(): PlanetTextureRes is not power of two, value 256 is used
Something is wrong.
Re-install Space Engine.
If possible, not on drive 'C:'. Because, there are also these messages:
This occurs when Windows denies access rights. You must then start SE as an administrator, or install the program somewhere where you have full access rights.
No i just killed the write rights for the mainuser.cfg myself since i dont want to switch back to auto exposure mode 1 by gui when im using 2 by config. thats why it gives me that error.
About that shader loading error yeah i used 420 instead of 256 to improve quality. i will check it out and see if this fixed my issue
EDIT: OK reinstall on drive D no fix + setting it back to 256 or 512 fixed the error message but didnt fix the solar corona :/
Added (02.11.2016, 19:40) --------------------------------------------- NVM i fixed it myself Auto Exposure 2 overbrightend my Flares so they werent as good as unseeable. Now its awesome
Edited by FSchollbrock - Wednesday, 02.11.2016, 18:04
auto exposure on with diffraction spikes on causes the sun(s) to completely disappear in every system on every world when approaching the surface. I first noticed it on Pluto but it happens on procedural planets too.
This has been mentioned a few times by others above, but I had not seen any solutions.
I have a fresh install of 9.8.0 drivers up to date GTX 970
Is anyone seeing a comeback of the issues with the 3d water? It seems to turn itself off after an extended time away from water-bearing worlds. Its hard to reproduce on my end. Usually it turns itself of after several startup/exit cycles for me.
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 :( )
I had 9.8.0 running with no problems until a recent Windows 10 update. Now I've noticed a few issues cropping up:
1) Consistently crashes when I exit 2) Occaisionally crashes while close to a procedural planet surface (although not so often that I can reliably reproduce it). 3) 3D water surface no longer ripples - that is, a rippled surface is there, but does not move.
I have the latest Nvidia drivers (I noticed that there were two updates in quick succession after the Win10 update, which is probably not a coincidence ;-) ). But even with the latest one, I still get the crashes. I've looked through the troubleshooting advice at the beginning of the thread, including turning off the Nvidia thread optimization and increasing the minimum amount of video memory in the config file, but no luck.
My system: i7-6500U 2.5GHz, 8GB RAM NVidia GTX950M
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