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 think I found my bug! I read that SE 0.9.8.0 added new nebulae, so I tried turning those off. No dice. So I wondered if it was to do with the new "medium" black hole quality setting, although I doubted it. Also no effect. So in desperation I tried turning on and off all sorts of other view settings until I got to turning off... COMET TAILS. (I'm not sure why I thought turning off comet tails wasn't helping before.) The system I'd found, as well as the other two with which I'd run tests, all involved "comet" tails emanating from planets very close to the stars. I don't know what it is exactly, but apparently SE 0.9.8.0 changed its way of rendering comet tails such that they crash the game sometimes.
The good news is that for now I seem to have found a workaround that'll keep me able to play the game. The bad news is that I guess I have to say goodbye to comets :\
Intel HD Graphics 4000 ;P
Edited by parameciumkid - Monday, 08.08.2016, 16:45
Quote SpaceHopper () And here's something else I found...R136a1 (which is supposed to be a single star) is bifurcated in 0.980. I hope this gets fixed in the next version. And I wonder if anyone else has seen bifurcated catalog single stars in 0.980.
Catalog stars are not bifurcated since 0.972. If you find a binary catalog star, this mean what it is indeed binary. Cirax made huge work making the binary stars catalog for SE.
'R136a1' is not as a binary star in the catalog!
I think that's a problem with Wolf-Rayet stars. It looks as if SpaceEngine makes in 'SE 0.980' all Wolf-Rayet stars to binary stars. In this script are some Wolf-Rayet stars from the central cluster of the Tarantua nebula. They all become binary stars!
I am trying to tweak the SolarSystemGenerator settings in main-user.cfg, however they seem to have no effect, such as increasing the ProbDryOceania. I set it to 99.0, and the ratio of terras to oceanias remains the same as when the parameter is default (0.1). Bug?
Edit: Clearing the cache doesn't help either.
Edit 2: An unrelated bug is that Space Engine does not seem to be calculating bolometric luminosity. While keeping absmagn and radius the same for a star or binary stars, adding three zeroes to a temperature of 5000 to raise it to 5000000 does not seem to have an affect on nearby planets. Is anyone else seeing this?
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 :( )
Edited by PlutonianEmpire - Tuesday, 09.08.2016, 06:35
I subscribed to this forum to share my experience with a problem in SE 0.9.8.0. But before I do so, let me start with saying that I find SE the best software I have ever seen. Traveling through space was a dream of mine since I was a young boy. SE makes this virtually possible. Great! Many thanks for this wonderful program.
Now, I have experienced (like others) blackouts in SE 0.9.8.0. Everything but the cursor disappears now and then. This never occurs in the inter-galactic space but always near or in solar systems. I found out that if I uncheck the comet tail option (in the F4 menu), the blackouts stop happening.
I use Windows 10 on an Acer laptop and according to se.log my renderer is Intel® HD Graphics 4400. I hope this helps with solving the problem.
Let me end this with once again expressing my great appreciation for SE!
The only correct solution would probably be a new graphics card. Either Nvidia or AMD.
Also, updating the driver might help somewhat. Sometimes.
Intel video cards work with some luck. particularly the newer cards, but SpaceEngine is not optimized for these graphics cards. You can not expect that with an Intel-card everything is displayed as it should.
And you should always attach the SE.log here if you have problems with SpaceEngine.
This can be seen from the fact that 1208 times this line:
Code
[MT] WARNING: System of star "Sgr A*" appears multiple times in the render list!
appears in your log file.
I have no idea what could be the cause. I can not check if this has something to do with the Intel card. My Intel card - I have a hybrid card (ATI + Intel HD) - is so old, the SE is no longer running on it.
I would recommend that you delete the 'cache' folder. 'SpaceEngine\cache', and then control whether this warning still appears.
I can corroborate that the blackout bug is not the fault of old Intel cards. People are always quick to blame those, but note that 0.9.7.4 did not have these, and the changelog since 0.9.7.4 doesn't seem to include any new graphical features that would affect comet tails or anything else in the systems where blackouts occur. I recall that in the past there was a bug wherein comet tails would appear as black rectangles, so I have come to suspect that the blackout might be a case of a comet tail rendering as a black rectangle and also covering the screen.
Hi, I encountered a problem with the system chart of a very large system (1362 bodies). At the end of the chart, several small bodies are put at the same spot, fusing them together and forming a clump. We can also see that their names are superposed.
Thanks for the excellent work, I'm always very excited to see what's new.
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