Missing Textures for Streaming World

[Freeman]

Not sure what's going on, but when I start up in the streaming world setting none of the ground textures are visible. It's completely white.

If I import a city, it works fine.

Just been playing with it today, so not really even sure where to look yet as to what I missed doing.

Thanks again for the work on this, it's great.

[LypyL]

Hello Freeman, welcome to the forums!

That's an interesting one...I haven't heard of or seen that one myself

From your description, I take it the only thing that appears to be broken in the Streaming World scenes are the ground textures? Everything else seems to be OK?

[Freeman]

Correct. Only the ground texture is missing, and only in the streaming world.

Trees, towns, area notifications, Dungeons, interiors, monsters, movement compass all seem intact and working.

So, I figure I missed doing... something... just no idea what it could be.

[LypyL]

I wouldn't point the finger at yourself just yet

I'm assuming you're playing in the editor and not in a build? Are there are error message in the console?

[Freeman]

Well, we can atleast point the finger at me so far of not having started there. I know better than that... and should have had that ready to go. Totally slipping in my old age.

EDIT: SNIP!

And then when going to get the errors, I forgot to relink my arena2 folder, so previously here was not accurate.

New news... no... no errors...

[Interkarma]

Thank you for your bug report Freeman, and welcome to the forums!

I've seen this issue before, mainly with odd environments (like running inside VMWare) and lower-end video cards (i.e. older integrated GPUs). Basically the GPU isn't handling tex2Dgrad or ddx/ddy quite right. Even if a GPU is SM3.0 compatible, it may run into issues with the shader on some hardware. Believe it or not, a lot of work goes into making the terrain look so retro, it's an interesting read if you're into shader programming.

When importing a standalone city into editor it uses a different technique (mesh-based) to accomplish a similar tiling effect. That's why the problem only happens when playing the streaming world.

Could you let me know your system specs (CPU, RAM, Graphics Card/GPU)? This information might help me get a lock on the exact issue and provide a fallback technique for affected hardware.

[Freeman]

Let you see what I'm looking at:

https://youtu.be/JX8XVXZz2Z8

(didn't see your reply before posting, but I"ll keep the video up in case it helps someone else.)

[Freeman]

i7-2600 @3.4
8 Gigs Memory
Win 7 Enterprise 64bit
Radeon 6950

If I had to throw a dart, it's that 6950. I've held on to it too long, but it's doing the job for most things.

I will read that other bit, shaders are something I'm just starting to mess with, and seems like as good a place to start as any.

[Interkarma]

Thanks for the details Freeman. Yep, the issue in your video is definitely the same shader problem I've seen on some GPUs. I might even have a 6950 in my spare parts collection, but could have culled it when we moved 2 years back. If I can put my hands on it, I'll setup a test rig.

Something else you can do (if you get time) is play the latest demo then send me the "output_log.txt" file generated (in the _Data folder). This should contain further error information not shown in the editor.

[Freeman]

Just a quick update for anyone who finds this thread in the future.

Getting a copy of the mod demo seems to have cleared it up. Still not 100% sure why, but will take the win for now.

Thanks again to Interkarma and LypyL for the help. Time for me to get to work, hopefully in time for Unity's networking roll out later this year.