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 do remember something similar happened some time ago and I was hoping someone else could answer, I'm afraid I don't remember if there was a solution. I don't have my computer right now and I don't remember what is the last Nvidia version, but I think you could update your graphic drivers. It could be useful if you shared also other data by capturing screenshots with GUI next time so everybody can visit the same coordinates in space and time, in order to check eventually driver related issues.
"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 do remember something similar happened some time ago and I was hoping someone else could answer, I'm afraid I don't remember if there was a solution. I don't have my computer right now and I don't remember what is the last Nvidia version, but I think you could update your graphic drivers. It could be useful if you shared also other data by capturing screenshots with GUI next time so everybody can visit the same coordinates in space and time, in order to check eventually driver related issues.
Very good idea. I will make another screen shot later today. I will also look into a new or different graphics driver.
In the meantime can anyone else help me with this transparent mountain/terrain issue?
First, congrats on a lot of work, @SpaceEngineer! It was a nice surprise to see SE jump into 0.9.8! I'm really liking what I see :)
Second, I have two (possible) bugs that I want to report here.
1) I went to look at some white dwarfs, neutron stars, and black holes. While black holes are rendering very well, neutron stars and white dwarfs appear as solid white disks for me. Attached screen is a neutron star.
2) I cannot seem to find any neutron stars or black holes with accretion disks. I tried a 1000-ly search area for those with "rings" and while I found a handful that matched the filter, no accretion disk was visible, and the Editor blanks out those fields (implying they are generated with accretionDisk "false" or whatever the exact tag is).
Attached is my SE.log, which has shown no errors that I can spot.
System: Windows 7 Pro SP1 Dell Precision M3800 Intel Core i7-4712HQ, 2 x 2.30 GHz 12GB RAM
Video: NVidia Quadro K1100M 2048 MB GDDR5 Driver vers. 333.25 (AFAICT this is the latest)
Not the greatest system any more, I'll admit, but so far it's been pretty solid for SE.
2) I cannot seem to find any neutron stars or black holes with accretion disks. I tried a 1000-ly search area for those with "rings" and while I found a handful that matched the filter, no accretion disk was visible, and the Editor blanks out those fields (implying they are generated with accretionDisk "false" or whatever the exact tag is).
Try Sagittarius A. A black hole in the center of Milky Way. That one has accretion disk.
Try Sagittarius A. A black hole in the center of Milky Way. That one has accretion disk.
Indeed, I do find an accretion disk around Sgr A*--but not around any procedurally generated objects as far as I can find. Even if the Star Browser claims a match, it isn't actually.
Do you know how to fix the annoying bug where the screen goes black when u visit stars like Alpha centauri?" I know it's not a graphics card issue. The bug wasn't in earlier versions
I'm also having difficulty figuring out how to use the /addons/ folder. I've tried just about everything from putting my .scs directly therein to (as the download page suggests) putting all the .scs for a custom system into one big .pak (.zip) with no further folder structure.
Attached is my log for this last attempt. The file structure I'm attempting to use here looks something like...
Admittedly I have not tried =editing= said .scs yet to accommodate some of the new features, but I would expect to see errors coming up in se.log. Instead, SE seems to ignore the .pak file (or files) in /addons/ and goes on its merry way loading all the default catalogs.
(Note that, if I put folders in /addons/, se.log reflects scanning each folder and subfolder therein... but still does nothing with any .pak or .sc files I've put there.)
aimeilian, the folder structure must be: 'addons\catalogs\planets' and 'addons\catalogs\stars'
This folders you must create if they do not exist.
In the folder 'addons\catalogs\stars' belong all the scripts for 'StarBarycenter', or single stars that are not tied to a 'StarBarycenter'. In your case, that's probably 'stars.sc'
In the folders 'addons\catalogs\planets' belong the scripts with planets, asteroids, comets, and so on. And stars that belong to a 'StarBarycenter'. For example, double stars like Alpha Centauri A and Alpha Centauri B.
The .pak files usually go in the folder 'addons'. But only if they contain the correct folder structure. So for example 'catalogs\planets' and 'catalogs\stars'.
If there is no 'catalogs' folders in the .pak file, but only the folders 'planets' and 'stars', then the .pak file must in the 'addons\catalogs' folder.
Ah, thank you @JackDole! That wasn't clear at all from the Downloads notes :)
After a little bit of fussing (I had been using sub-folders for each planet, which appears not to work), I now have a custom system that features some utterly bizarre planets. Which is expected since this was an unedited port from 0.9.7.3
Welp. I was about to post "pleased to report that everything seems to work fine for Intel HD Graphics 4000 on Windows 10..." but alas! While double-checking I did indeed find a problem. I have yet to pin it down exactly, but it seems as if something in star surface loading and rendering is causing CTDs. I was flying around looking for a new base when I found a cool more or less habitable terra orbiting a binary white and red dwarf system: ...and when I tried to go in close to the star SpaceEngine either crashed entirely or did an odd thing wherein the entire screen turned black, but based on what I could hear the menus, panning the camera, and presumably all the other controls worked fine (I of course ended up having to quit anyway since I couldn't see anything). At first I thought it might have to do with auroras or whatnot, since those have bugged me in the past, so I tried turning off auroras, comet trails, water, and even clouds and atmospheres. No luck. I noted the addition of procedural carbon stars in this version, so I investigated whether those were the problem by visiting a variety of different stars and zooming in on them. I tried a few random white dwarfs and had nothing bad happen (although I did notice that they still had plain white surfaces and no gravitational lensing, disappointingly); then some red dwarfs and still nothing; then I visited carbon star HIP 90709/HD 170495 and experienced the problem again. When far from the star, everything appears nominal, but when approaching it, even slowly, SE either goes all black or crashes. If it goes black, I can drag the camera to look away from the star, then restart SE and be able to play again; but if it crashes, predictably, I just have to keep restarting until it doesn't or turn off stars so I can escape to another system. Here's some additional data I've collected in the hopes it might help: - The distance at which the crash occurs seems to roughly coincide with when the star changes from a point sprite to a 3D model; in the case of HIP 90709/HD 170495 this happens at about 4550 AU. - Carbon stars, as well as all other stars, work just fine in the system "map" (F2) and in the Info window - Changing the loader mode between immediate, interleaved, and asynchronous seems to have no effect. - Changing "PreloadDrawShaders" to 1 also seems to have no effect. - I read something about an old bug with sprite rendering on Intel GPUs, so I tried changing the point sources style to "points;" still no dice. - On occasion, particularly when a system has more than 9 planets, the screen will go all black for a few frames when pulling up the F2 chart, but in this case it seems to recover fine on its own.
I have attached my save file and se.log, although having skimmed through them I don't feel like they'll be very informative :\
EDIT: Okay this is getting weird now. I tried going to Proxima Centauri and orbiting around the system using the right mouse button. At certain distances and angles, the screen goes all black, but returns if I orbit or zoom in or out enough to leave the "bug zone." Waiting for a few seconds does not appear to have an effect. I suspect the "bug zones" are related to areas where certain stars in the system are or not rendering as 3D models. EDIT EDIT: Wow, derp. All this time I'd thought Proxima was part of the Alpha Centauri system. Apparently what I was looking at wasn't stars at all but procedural planets around the star. I'm so lost! So I went to Alpha Centauri instead, and there I found the same problem again. The "bug zone" in this case seems to be where both stars (there's two, right? I saw two.) are at roughly the same distance from the camera, although orbiting and zooming didn't save me this time - the screen went black and stuck that way :C
EDIT EDIT EDIT: After moving this to the correct thread (herp derp) and combing through it, this seems to be the same issue affecting Ostarisk and Jonahrf, and possibly also PlutonianEmpire. I too did not experience this problem in any of the "RC" versions.
Increasing my VideoMemorySize to 2048 appears to have helped for now. Nope! It helped with Alpha Cen and some other stars, but when I tried going back to that interesting binary I'd found, the problem came right back. I tried increasing the memory size even further to 3072, but to no avail. What could it be that's causing SE 0.9.8 to need all that extra memory that 0.9.7.4 didn't?
Update: More information if it helps. Below is a screenshot from Debug Mode. The star in question renders normally from this angle near the equator, but orbiting to look at it from either pole causes the screen to go all black. Going back to this angle restores it.
Another update (sorry for making this so long): I read through the entire changelog for 0.9.8.0 both on the Downloads page and at http://en.spaceengine.org/forum/21-3022-218#69881 and didn't see anything related to terrain or star loading or rendering, so I double-checked with 0.9.7.4 RC3. The red hypergiant I mentioned today did not exist, but the system mentioned above with the white dwarf did and everything worked perfectly. So I can say with confidence that the bug we're seeing was introduced in between 0.9.7.4 RC3 and 0.9.8.0. Also, I tried running SE with no catalogs to see if that would help by reducing the demand for video memory. No effect.
Intel HD Graphics 4000 ;P
Edited by parameciumkid - Monday, 08.08.2016, 16:01
I have a bug here with the star browser. When searching for stars, none of the text shows up, but the stars are definitely there as I can select them and go to them. Below is a link to the screenshot.
And after some point in the star browser, it just crashes.
I found a bug where texture is transparent to my moon yet uses procedural textures, I capture with and without atmospheres and my se.log. Without atmosphere :
Edit : After opening Space Engine, transparent texture has disappeared to be replaced with the procedural texture, giving the normal appearance of my moon.
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