Spell Icon rendered as blank square

[Otolith]

My O/S is macOS 10.12.5. This problem occurs with Daggerfall Unity versions 0.7.126 and 0.7.145 (these are the only two versions I've ever used). I first noticed the problem without any mods installed. I have installed (and uninstalled) various mods with both versions: the problem remains exactly the same.

The general problem is that spell icons only appear as a blank (light grey) square.

I first noticed this in the spellbook. Each spell has three associated icons.

• The one on the right indicating base type (fire/magic/etc.) is fine: correct image and tooltip text.
• The one in the middle indicating target (caster/touch/etc.) is also fine: correct image and tooltip text.
• The one on the left, however, is just blank. The tooltip says "Select icon". Clicking on this brings up a panel with two sections: at the top it says "VMBlast Test Pack", followed by 69 blank squares; at the bottom it says "Classic", also followed by 69 blank squares.

My character acquired a constant effect item. When worn, a blank square is always shown on the screen (i.e. when looking around in both interior and exterior areas).

When my character casts a spell with a duration, a blank square appears, flashes towards the end of the duration, then disappears.

Overall, the placement, number and behaviour of the spell icons seems to be correct; the only problem is that all of these icons are blank.

[Interkarma]

Welcome to the forums.

Could you please provide a zipped copy of your output log for this one. Check the pinned bug report guidelines where to find this on each platform.

[Otolith]

Thanks for the speedy response and the welcome.

I'm assuming that's "Player.log' for a Mac. Zipped copy attached as "Player.zip". If "output log" referred to something else, please specify.

[Interkarma]

Thank you. Could you also let me know the model of Mac computer you are using?

[Otolith]

I think the answer you're looking for is "Mac Pro". There's nothing I know of that actually designates "Model: ...". It's a desktop computer with separate tower, monitor and peripherals.

In case it's useful, now or in the future, here's what the "Overview" tab shows from the "About This Mac" system menu selection:

macOS Sierra
Version 10.12.5
Mac Pro (Mid 2010)
Processor 2.8 GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon
Memory 8 GB 1066 MHz DDR3
Startup Disk Macintosh HD
Graphics ATI Radeon HD 5770 1024 MB

Possibly other useful information:

• Currently 233 GB free on the disk drive.
• I typically have >3 GB RAM available (currently 3.90 GB).
• I have a 27 inch 2560x1440 monitor (I play Daggerfall at that resolution in full screen).

I can't think what else might be useful for you; just ask if you want additional information.

Again, thankyou for your timely attention to this matter.

[Interkarma]

Thank you for the system specs. That HD 5770 is a rather old GPU (released October 2009). Looking through your logs, it seem to be having trouble with the texture format of the icons packs.

Code: Select all

WARNING: RGBA Compressed BC7 UNorm format is not supported, decompressing texture

Searching around for this error, it turns out to be an issue with modern versions of Unity and older GPUs such as this one. The HD 5770 is roughly equivalent to a GTX 550, which doesn't quite meet minimum specs for Daggerfall Unity.

Possibly this is something that could be tuned out through settings, but the age of the computer is a big factor here. I'll move this one to Help & Support as it's related to system specs rather than a bug in Daggerfall Unity. Hopefully someone else with a similar platform can share some advice on how to resolve.

[Otolith]

Many thanks for looking into this. It seems my computer is showing its age and I'll probably have to live with this until I upgrade.

The time you've spent on this is much appreciated.

[pango]

I found in Unity 2018.2 docs:

Note that BC7 is not available on Mac when using OpenGL.
[...] When loading BC7 textures on a platform that does not support it, the texture will be decompressed into RGBA32 format (32 bits per pixel) at load time.

So if I read that right it should happen on all versions of OSX, but should still kind of work by uncompressing textures ahead of time.
Can someone confirm that Daggerfall Unity spell icons do work on more recent Macs?

[Interkarma]

I'm not entirely sure why this one happens. The spell icons are just a regular 32-bit PNG file loaded dynamically at runtime with Unity's Texture2D.LoadImage(). It should not have any form of compression enabled, and other textures loaded a similar way are obviously working fine.

I wonder if its because this texture load doesn't specify ARGB32 like others of the sort? It certainly can't hurt to add this and see if helps in next round of builds.

[Otolith]

I put Daggerfall Unity on hold for a while until I upgraded my computer system (which was something I was planning to do anyway, given it was about 9 years old).

I've actually changed OS: now using Windows 10. The previous, 10-year-old GPU seemed to be the main cause of the problems I was experiencing; I'm now using an nVidia GeForce RTX 2080 Ti.

All graphical issues are now resolved and Daggerfall Unity is running like a dream.

Thanks again for all your help with this.